Astronomers find black hole spins on its side – Deccan Chronicle

Berlin: A recent discovery by a team of astronomers found that the black hole spins on its side. The team published their findings in the journal ‘Science’. Scientist Prof. Dr Svetlana Berdyugina, Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Freiburg and Director of the Leibniz Institute for Solar Physics (KIS), together with an international team of astronomers, has reliably measured for the first time a large difference between the rotation axis of the black hole and the axis of the orbit of the binary star system named MAXI J1820+070. The black hole’s rotation axis is tilted by more than 40 degrees with respect to the axis of the star’s orbit. “This finding challenges current theoretical models of black hole formation,” Berdyugina said. “The difference of more than 40 degrees between the orbital axis and the spin of the black hole was completely unexpected. Scientists have often assumed that this difference is very small when modelling the behaviour of matter in a curved period around a black hole,” Berdyugina explained. The new finding forced astronomers to add a new dimension to their models. The research team made its discovery with the astronomical polarimeter DIPol-UF, an instrument for measuring the angle of…
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