I thought nothing actually crossed the event horizon and was essentially frozen approaching a complete stop in time in a kind of 2f representation of 3d reality until it slowly leaked out trillions of years later as hawking radiation?
Comment on Scientists confirm that the first black hole ever imaged is actually spinning
hotdaniel@lemmy.zip 1 year agoWell… does it? If all the stuff falls in and only the volume remains, who could say that it’s spinning? How could you detect it?
Fungah@lemmy.world 1 year ago
hotdaniel@lemmy.zip 1 year ago
From an outsider’s perspective, you would see an object approach and then freeze. It would red-shift dimmer until it disappeared. From an in-falling perspective, I don’t think you’d notice anything at all.
AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 1 year ago
For one thing, the size and shape of the event horizon changes depending on the black hole’s spin.
Smokeydabear94@lemmy.world 1 year ago
What would happen if one were to stop spinning? Could one even stop spinning?
AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Yes—it’s called the Penrose process.
hotdaniel@lemmy.zip 1 year ago
I see. Thank you. So, you can use light to infer the mass, and then the volume information to infer the spin? Easy enough.
AbouBenAdhem@lemmy.world 1 year ago
That would be a general way, if we were close enough to observe the shape of the event horizon (which we aren’t).
The article is describing another way, which only works in this case because the black hole is precessing so extremely: the changing axis of rotation is frame-dragging the polar jets along with it.