Spinning Black Hole Animation | SpaceRef Image Gallery

As the animation begins, a wide-angle view shows the black hole and a nearby blue giant star in a binary (double) system. Celestial objects in binary systems orbit closely around their common center of mass. At this point, the black hole is located to the left of a blue giant star. The powerful gravity of the black hole pulls gas from the blue giant, which forms a tail-like structure as it streams toward the black hole.

As the animation zooms in the gas can be seen forming a disk-shaped structure as it whirls around the black hole, like soap suds spiraling down a bathtub drain. Lines from the poles of the black hole represent jets of gas being ejected from the vicinity of the black hole at nearly the speed of light (about 186,000 miles per second). Although nothing can escape a black hole once it passes its point of no return, called the event horizon, black holes are "sloppy eaters," often expelling matter that approaches but does not cross the event horizon. The poorly understood jets are frequently seen near black holes that are swallowing copious quantities of gas.

Moving in further we reach the immediate vicinity of the black hole, with the event horizon depicted as a black sphere. The surrounding disk of gas, represented by white and blue rings, whirls around the black hole at different speeds, with the material closest to the black hole approaching the speed of light. Because it moves at different speeds, atoms that comprise the gas rub against each other and become intensely hot, causing them to emit high-energy radiation, like X-rays. These X-rays reveal an otherwise invisible black hole.

The gap between the gas disk and the event horizon represents the innermost stable orbit matter can have before plunging into the black hole. A spinning black hole modifies the fabric of space-time near it. The spinning allows matter to orbit at a closer distance than if the black hole were not spinning, and the closer matter can get the faster it can orbit.

As if black holes weren't menacing enough, astronomers now have observational evidence that at least some of them spin about like whirlpools, wrapping up the fabric of space with them.

Dr. Tod Strohmayer of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD, has studied one such black hole system with NASA's Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer and found unique patterns in the X-ray radiation that have previously only been seen in spinning neutron stars. With these new parameters, he could verify that a black hole, like a neutron star, can spin.

The black hole that Strohmayer observed is the stellar variety, which is formed from a collapsed star. When stars at least 10 times more massive than our Sun exhaust their fuel supply, they no longer have the energy to support their tremendous bulk. These stars explode their outer shell of gas in an event called a supernova.

Strohmayer's target was GRO J1655-40, a microquasar 10,000 light years from Earth. A microquasar is a specific type of black hole with jets of high-speed particles shooting perpendicularly from the plane of matter that orbits it. Strohmayer observed two QPOs, a previously detected one at about 300 Hertz (Hz) and a newly detected one at 450 Hz. (A hertz is a unit of frequency equal to one cycle per second.)

The black hole mass has been established at seven times the mass of our Sun from earlier optical observations of GRO J1655-40. "A spinning black hole modifies the fabric of space near it," said Strohmayer. "The spinning allows matter to orbit at a closer distance than if it were not spinning, and the closer matter can get the faster it can orbit. For GRO J1655-40 we can now say that the only way for it to produce the 450 Hz oscillations is if it is spinning."