After 20 years of observations, a supermassive black hole at the middle of a nearby galaxy was discovered spinning, bolstering Albert Einstein’s century-old theories of general relativity, an astrophysicist told Fox News.
A black hole is a region in space where gravity is so strong that not even light can escape, in accordance with NASA. After stitching together images from observatories across the Earth, scientists discovered the black hole’s jet — beams of particles emanating from the void’s axis – were moving, confirming that the mass was spinning, in accordance with a Sept. 27 study published within the journal Nature.
“After the success of black hole imaging on this galaxy with the Event Horizon Telescope, whether this black hole is spinning or not has been a central concern amongst scientists,” said astrophysicist and study co-author Kazuhiro Hada from the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan. “Now anticipation has changed into certainty. This monster black hole is indeed spinning.”
The supermassive black hole resides about 55 million light-years away in the middle of the nearby Messier 87 galaxy — also referred to as M87, in accordance with the study. Scientists found the black hole’s jet moves in a predictable 11-year cycle, which over time allowed them to find out that the celestial formation spins.
![Event Horizon Telescope captures a black hole at the center of galaxy M87](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-1136111087.jpg?w=1024)
“The one two properties that astrophysical black holes possess are mass and spin, and spin is notoriously difficult to measure,” Wystan Benbow, an astrophysicist for the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told Fox News in a statement. “This discovery gives us further, independent evidence that the black hole in M87 is spinning.”
“Proving that supermassive black holes spin would offer further evidence in support of Einstein’s theories of relativity,” Benbow added. “Independently confirming that they’re spinning using a latest technique places many necessary theories on much firmer footing.”
The black hole in M87 is 5.4 billion times larger than the sun and was the primary void to be photographed, in accordance with NASA.
![Illustration of the event horizon of a black hole](https://nypost.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2023/10/GettyImages-1237974241.jpg?w=1024)
Before this discovery, scientists only had some “circumstantial evidence for spinning black holes,” but now there’s “smoking gun evidence for the black hole spin,” Igor Chilingaryan, an astronomer at Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told Fox News in an email.
“There may be a mechanism called the ‘Penrose process’ that allows one to extract energy from a spinning black hole — and now we all know that it could actually in truth work within the Universe and never just on paper,” Chilingaryan continued.
Black holes are “in all places,” and supermassive ones are at the middle of virtually every galaxy, Benbow told Fox News.
The recent discovery “will even give us insight into how black holes and their host galaxies co-evolve and the way our universe got here to have the large-scale structure that it does today,” he added. “In any case, that is a very important milestone.”