Black Hole in NGC 1365 (IMAGE)

Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian

Black Hole in NGC 1365

Caption

In this artist's conception a supermassive black hole is surrounded by a hot accretion disk, while some inspiraling material is funneled into a wispy blue jet. New measurements show that the black hole at the center of galaxy NGC 1365 is spinning at close to the maximum possible rate. This suggests that it grew via "ordered accretion" rather than by swallowing random blobs of gas and stars.

Credit

NASA/JPL-Caltech

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