The Milky Way's Black Hole is Spinning as Fast as it Can

[Seldom Bucket]

Pick any object in the Universe, and it is probably spinning. Asteroids tumble end over end, planets and moons rotate on their axes, and even black holes spin. And for everything that spins, there is a maximum rate at which it can rotate. The black hole in our galaxy is spinning at nearly that maximum rate.


For objects such as the Earth, the maximum rate of rotation is defined by its surface gravity. The weight we feel while standing on the Earth isn’t just due to the gravitational pull of the Earth. Gravity pulls us toward the center of our world, but the Earth’s rotation also tends to fling us outward away from the Earth. This “centrifugal” force is tiny, but it does mean that your weight at the equator is just slightly less than it is at the north or south pole.

The Milky Way's Black Hole is Spinning as Fast as it Can

Is the supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way (SagA*) spinning? And how fast? It's tricky to know how fast a black hole is spinning without an accretion disk, but astronomers can estimate using polar outflows of material streaming from the black hole. Researchers observed the...

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