Katharine Hayhoe on Climate Change: "No Government Can Halt Progress"

A recent study has shown that supermassive black holes in the universe are rotating at significantly higher speeds than previously believed. Researchers from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) conducted this groundbreaking work, connecting black hole spins to the accretion of gas and dust over billions of years. Logan Fries from the University of Connecticut stated, "We unexpectedly found that they were spinning too fast to have been formed by galaxy mergers alone.” The findings suggest that the early universe's structure may have been more organized than assumed and indicate that black holes may grow largely through the materials they consume.
The research used the SDSS’s Reverberation Mapping project to measure black hole spins by analyzing variations in light emitted from their accretion disks. This study reveals that many black holes are spinning much faster than models based solely on mergers of galaxies would predict. Notably, those in distant galaxies exhibited even higher rotation rates, implying a gradual accumulation of angular momentum through accretion processes.
Fries presented these findings at the 245th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Maryland on January 14.