FLASHES of infrared from our galaxy’s central black hole suggest it is spinning like crazy. Astronomers believe that Sagittarius A* is a supermassive black hole weighing 3.6 million times as much as the sun, but until now they knew nothing else about it.
A team led by Reinhard Genzel of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics in Garching, Germany, spotted infrared flares from Sagittarius A* using the Very Large Telescope in Cerro Paranal, Chile. The flares repeat every 17 minutes and Genzel suggests that they come from material whirling around the black hole.
But the short interval between flashes…
