Naked Science Forum

Non Life Sciences => Physics, Astronomy & Cosmology => Topic started by: acecharly on 28/08/2012 10:55:55

Title: what would happen if you stopped a blackhole spinning?
Post by: acecharly on 28/08/2012 10:55:55

Any thoughts

Cheers Ace

Title: Re: what would happen if you stopped a blackhole spinning?
Post by: evan_au on 28/08/2012 12:41:49

There are very few things you can tell about a black hole - one of them is its spin, which influences the shape of the event horizon, and causes frame dragging. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole#Ergosphere

If you stopped a black hole from spinning, then this ergosphere would disappear.

You could think of casually:

• dropping in another black hole in a way which imparted equal and opposite angular momentum. This would cause some pretty impressive gravity waves.
• feeding in a few stars in the opposite direction to the black hole's current direction of rotation

I think for now, we should be content with just finding black holes with X-Ray telescopes...