Amazing stuff! Head spinning too! 😊
It appears neither the author of the popular science article nor the researchers actually measured how long one spin takes. Odd?
"... The new method, detailed in a paper published in Nature, involves observations of the “wobbling” stellar material left over from the black hole’s consumption. ...
Analysis showed the black hole spinning at less than 25% the speed of light – relatively slow for a black hole. The new method for measuring black hole spin could help determine the spin rates for hundreds of nearby black holes. ..."
From the abstract:
"An accretion disk formed around a supermassive black hole after it disrupts a star is expected to be initially misaligned with respect to the equatorial plane of the black hole. This misalignment induces relativistic torques (the Lense–Thirring effect) on the disk, causing the disk to precess at early times, whereas at late times the disk aligns with the black hole and precession terminates. Here we report, using high-cadence X-ray monitoring observations of a tidal disruption event (TDE), the discovery of strong, quasi-periodic X-ray flux and temperature modulations. These X-ray modulations are separated by roughly 15 days and persist for about 130 days during the early phase of the TDE. Lense–Thirring precession of the accretion flow can produce this X-ray variability, but other physical mechanisms, such as the radiation-pressure instability, cannot be ruled out. Assuming typical TDE parameters, that is, a solar-like star with the resulting disk extending at most to the so-called circularization radius, and that the disk precesses as a rigid body, we constrain the disrupting dimensionless spin parameter of the black hole to be 0.05 ≲ ∣a∣ ≲ 0.5."
Extended Data Fig. 7: A simplified schematic of a potential model showing Lense-Thirring precession of an inner disk.
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