November 7, 1997
Light takes eight minutes to travel from the Sun to the Earth. It took the universe 13.8 billion years to make you.
Evidence for Frame Dragging Black Holes
Birthday · November 7, 1997
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APOD published November 7, 1997. Credit: J. Bergeron, Sky & Telescope Magazine. A publication-date match, not a photo taken on your date. Independent of NASA.
Gravity can do more than floor you. According to recent measurements of a star system thought to contain a black hole, it can spin you too. This effect, called frame-dragging, is most prominent near massive, fast spinning objects. Now, a team led by W. Cui (MIT) has used the orbiting Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer to search for it near a system thought to contain a black hole. Cui's team claim that matter in this system gets caught up and spun around the black hole at just the rate expected from frame-dragging. Such discoveries help scientists better understand gravity itself.
Image credit: J. Bergeron, Sky & Telescope Magazine