{"id":4383,"date":"2019-01-11T21:14:19","date_gmt":"2019-01-11T21:14:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/2019\/01\/11\/astronomers-discover-a-supermassive-black-hole-rotating-at-half-the-speed-of-light-motherboard\/"},"modified":"2019-01-19T14:20:37","modified_gmt":"2019-01-19T14:20:37","slug":"astronomers-discover-a-supermassive-black-hole-rotating-at-half-the-speed-of-light-motherboard","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/2019\/01\/11\/astronomers-discover-a-supermassive-black-hole-rotating-at-half-the-speed-of-light-motherboard\/","title":{"rendered":"Astronomers Discover a Supermassive Black Hole Rotating At Half the Speed of Light – Motherboard"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

NASA astronomers have observed a supermassive black hole that is rotating at least 380 million miles per hour, or at half the speed of light.<\/p>\n

To put that in perspective, that means the black hole\u2014with a diameter 300 times larger than Earth\u2014completes a rotation roughly every two minutes.<\/p>\n

As detailed in a <\/span>paper<\/a> <\/span>published Wednesday in <\/span>Science<\/i>, the team took the unprecedented measurement of the black hole\u2019s rotation using observations from a suite of space-based x-ray observatories, including NASA\u2019s Chandra telescope.<\/p>\n

Astronomers were able to observe over 300,000 rotational cycles, giving the most precise measurement of a supermassive black hole ever taken.<\/p>\n

The black hole, located about 290 million light years from Earth, first came to astronomers\u2019 attention in 2014 after a strong burst of light was detected by optical telescopes. Upon closer investigation, astronomers discovered that the light was the result of a star getting torn to shreds by a supermassive black hole.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

https:\/\/motherboard.vice.com\/en_us\/article\/7xyg9d\/astronomers-discover-a-supermassive-black-hole-rotating-at-half-the-speed-of-light<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

NASA astronomers have observed a supermassive black hole that is rotating at least 380 million miles per hour, or at half the speed of light. To put that in perspective, that means the black hole\u2014with a diameter 300 times larger than Earth\u2014completes a rotation roughly every two minutes. As detailed in a paper published Wednesday […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4383","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3pfIY-18H","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4383","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4383"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4383\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4396,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4383\/revisions\/4396"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4383"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4383"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.novonon.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4383"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}