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1. SPACE
EXPLORATION
SECTION: BCY-1A
GROUP MEMBERS: i) Muhammad Abdullah ii) Misha
iii) Zumair Shamsi iv) Wajiha
v) Rohaan vi) Hassan Siddique

2. This Huge Black Hole Is Spinning at Half the
Speed of Light!
The crumbs left over from a supermassive
black hole's recent meal have allowed
scientists to calculate the monster's rotation
rate, and the results are mind-boggling.
The huge Black Hole, known as ASASSN-14li,
is spinning at least 50 percent the speed of
light, research team members said.
"This black hole’s event horizon is about 300
times bigger than the Earth," study co-author
Ron Remillard, of the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology (MIT), said in a statement. (The
event horizon is the limit beyond which
nothing, not even light, can escape a black
hole's gravitational clutches.)

3. X — RAY
ABOUT THIS PICTURE
Scientists used NASA's Chandra and Hubble
space telescopes, as well as other instruments,
to study the supermassive black hole system
ASASSN-14li and determine the spin rate of the
black hole, a fundamental property that has been
difficult for astronomers to measure.

4. ABOUT ASASSN-14li
In the new study, a team led by Dheeraj Pasham, also
of MIT, observed the X-ray light coming from the
ASASSN-14li system. The researchers analyzed data
gathered by a number of instruments, including
NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and Neil
Gehrels Swift space telescopes, as well as the
European Space Agency's XMM-Newton spacecraft.
These datasets revealed a consistent flickering:
ASASSN-14li's X-ray emissions rise and fall every
131 seconds. This clockwork signal is likely caused
by a clump of the torn-apart star circling the black
hole very close to the event horizon, study team
members said.

5. ABOUT ASASSN-14li
ASASSN-14li lies at the heart of a galaxy 290 million
light-years away from Earth and harbors between 1
million and 10 million times the mass of the sun. So, it's
about as hefty as the black hole at the Milky Way's
core, known as Sagittarius A*, which contains about 4
million solar masses. (Supermassive black holes can
get much weightier; some tip the scales at tens of
billions of solar masses.)
ASASSN-14li was discovered in November 2014, after it
tore apart a star that strayed too close. This dramatic
event caused a flash of bright light, which was spotted
by a system of optical telescopes called the All-Sky
Automated Survey for Supernovae (hence the black
hole's name

6. ABOUT ASASSN-14li
The fact that we can track this region of bright X-ray
emission as it circles the black hole lets us track just
how quickly material in the disk is spinning," Pasham
said in the same statement."That gives us
information about the spin rate of the supermassive
black hole itself."
That spin speed is impressive but not unprecedented
The few supermassive black holes whose rotation
rates have been clocked to date are in the same
extreme neighborhood,generally whipping around
between 33 percent 84 percent the speed of light.
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8. THANK you