Black holes spin faster after eating each other

When it comes to black holes, there are some things we know a lot about them — in general. How they form, how they affect space around them, how they eat matter.

The details, though, are maddening. We know, for example, that black holes spin — as odd as that may sound — but how they get that spin and how spin changes over time is elusive knowledge.

A new study has given us an idea of that now, though. Here’s how this works: we see that as matter falls into them, some black holes generate twin beams, called jets, which shoot away from their poles. We see this from black holes that form when stars explode, and we see them in the supermassive black holes that inhabit the centers of all big galaxies, too. We know that that various physical feature of the jets are tied to the rate at which the black holes spin, and this new study makes this connection more clear. The astronomers used computer models to correlate spin to the jets, and observations appear to confirm these models.

Two very interesting results came out of ...

Full story at http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2011/06/08/black-holes-spin-faster-after-eating-each-other/