NASA Finds Evidence Black Holes Spin

Black holes, those voracious drains in space, may also spin as they gobble, dragging the fabric of the cosmos around with them, a NASA scientist reported Monday.

Most cosmic objects--planets, stars, galaxies--spin, but this is the first time astronomers have found evidence that black holes might do it too. Black holes cannot be seen, because their gravitational pull is so great that nothing, not even light, can escape. So, astronomers have concentrated on observing material just as it falls into the hole.

The material is known to swirl around the black hole’s mouth before disappearing, just as water swirls around a drain.

But now, astronomers at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center outside Washington have found patterns in X-ray radiation that had previously been observed only in spinning neutron stars--small, dense objects that can twirl in space.

“With black holes, it’s much harder to directly see that they are spinning, because they don’t have a solid surface that you can watch spin around,” said Goddard’s Tod Strohmayer, who presented his research Monday at the American Physical Society meeting in Washington. “We can, however, see the light emitted from matter plunging into the black hole. The matter whips frantically around the black hole before it is lost forever.”