Robert Lea is a science journalist in the U.K. who specializes in science, space, physics, astronomy, astrophysics, cosmology, quantum mechanics and technology. Rob's articles have been published in Physics World, New Scientist, Astronomy Magazine, All About Space and ZME Science.
The"wobbling" remains of a star that suffered a grisly death at the maw of a supermassive black hole has helped reveal the speed at which its cosmic predator spins.
Related: Supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way is approaching the cosmic speed limit, dragging space-time along with it Now, a team of researchers has discovered that the"wobble" of that accretion disk can be used to determine how fast the central black hole is spinning. Holy hot X-ray stellar pasta!To investigate TDEs and frame-dragging, the team spent five years searching for bright and relatively close examples of black-hole-induced stellar murders that could be quickly followed up on. The goal was to spot signs of accretion disk precession caused by the Lense-Thirring effect.
"The key was to have the right observations," Pasham said."The only way you can do this is, as soon as a tidal disruption event goes off, you need to get a telescope to look at this object continuously, for a very long time, so you can probe all kinds of timescales, from minutes to months."
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