Astronomers have made a new discovery about a distant black hole.
The decades-long study has discovered that the supermassive black hole at the center of the Messier 87 galaxy, known as M87, is spinning. Scientists believe that this discovery will aid in informing research on the evolution of galactic structures.
The new study published in the journal Nature on September 27 concluded that the black hole is spinning based on the movement of its jet — a high energy emission composed of radiation and particles — in an 11-year cycle. Scientists conducted this study, making observations over the course of 22 years.
The scientists claimed in the study that they were observing a “spinning black hole that induces the Lense–Thirring precession of a misaligned accretion disk.”
“With a baseline of 17 years of observations, there was a shift in the jet’s transverse position, possibly arising from an 8- to 10-year quasi-periodicity,” reads the study. “However, the origin of this sideways shift remains unclear.”
Wystan Benbow, an astrophysicist for the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told Fox News that this new discovery not only provides more evidence for Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity but also for other theories about these stellar objects.
“The only two properties that astrophysical black holes possess are mass and spin, and spin is notoriously challenging to measure,” said Benbow, according to Fox News. “This discovery gives us further, independent evidence that the black hole in M87 is spinning.”
Igor Chilingaryan, an astronomer at Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, also told Fox News that this study is “smoking gun evidence” for black hole rotation where other studies provided minimal evidence.
“There is a mechanism called the ‘Penrose process’ that allows one to extract energy from a spinning black hole — and now we know that it can in fact work in the Universe and not just on paper,” said Chilingaryan, according to Fox.
Researchers have been studying black holes since the discovery of the first suspected black hole, Cygnus X-1, in the 1970s. More recently, scientists discovered the oldest known black hole as well and revealed sharper images of another black hole this year, as previously reported by The Dallas Express.