A team of astronomers has managed to calculate the speed of a distant supermassive black hole’s spin thanks to the object’s chance meeting with a star—which it promptly destroyed.
On June 22, 2022, NASA’s Swift Observatory spotted something curious in a galaxy over 500 million light-years away. It was a routine outburst of gas that a team studying the data now believes is evidence of a black hole intermittently gobbling up a star each time the latter draws near.