Black hole at center of the Milky Way resembles a football

The supermassive black hole in the center of the Milky Way is spinning so quickly it is warping the spacetime surrounding it into a shape that can look like a football, according to a new study using data from NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and the U.S. National Science Foundation's Karl G. Jansky Very Large Array . That football shape suggests the black hole is spinning at a substantial speed, which researchers estimated to be about 60% of its potential limit.

Past estimations of Sgr A*'s speed have been made with different techniques and by other astronomers, with results ranging from no rotation at all to spinning at almost the maximum rate. The spin can also serve as an energy source, Daly said, if matter -- such as gas or the remnants of a star that wanders too close -- exists in the vicinity of the black hole. As the black hole spins, matter can escape in the form of narrow jets called collimated outflows. However, Sgr A* currently has limited nearby matter, so the black hole has been relatively quiet, with weakly collimated outflows, in recent millennia.

"Jets powered and collimated by a galaxy's spinning central black hole can profoundly affect the gas supply for an entire galaxy, which affects how quickly and even whether stars can form," said co-author Megan Donahue from Michigan State University."The 'Fermi bubbles' seen in X-rays and gamma rays around our Milky Way's black hole show the black hole was probably active in the past. Measuring the spin of our black hole is an important test of this scenario.

"We have a special view of Sgr A* because it is the nearest supermassive black hole to us," said co-author Anan Lu from McGill University in Montreal, Canada."Although it's quiet right now, our work shows that in the future it will give an incredibly powerful kick to surrounding matter. That might happen in a thousand or a million years, or it could happen in our lifetimes.

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