WASHINGTON, Feb. 27, 2013 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- Two X-ray
space observatories, NASA's Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope
Array (NuSTAR) and the European Space Agency's XMM-Newton, have
teamed up to measure definitively, for the first time, the spin
rate of a black hole with a mass 2 million times that of our
sun. The supermassive black hole lies at the dust and gas-filled
heart of a galaxy called NGC 1365, and it is spinning almost as
fast as Einstein's theory of gravity will allow. The findings,
which appear in a new study in the journal Nature, resolve a
long-standing debate about similar measurements in other black
holes and will lead to a better understanding of how black holes
and galaxies evolve. "This is hugely important to the field of
black hole science," said Lou Kaluzienski, a NuSTAR program
scientist at NASA Headquarters in Washington. The observations
also are a powerful test of Einstein's theory of general
relativity, which says gravity can bend space-time, the fabric
that shapes our universe,