This Bizarre, Tilted Black Hole Has Astronomers Puzzled

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Black holes are one of the most mysterious objects in space, and the latest discovery of a rather odd black hole spinning on a tilted axis strongly misaligned with its orbital plane has added yet another dimension of mystery to these cosmic behemoths. Unfortunately, measuring a black hole’s spin rate is no easy job. That primarily has to do with the fact that they don’t even allow light to escape, forcing scientists to adopt indirect methods such as X-rays coming from proxies like the disk of matter feeding the black hole. In 2013, scientists relied on an alternative approach to study the black hole at the center of the NGC 1365 galaxy and calculated its spin rate to fall somewhere around 86 percent of the speed of light.

However, specific processes are associated with a black hole that happens much faster. For example, in 2020, scientists observed that the black hole in Messier 87 galaxy was shooting jets of energized particles at a speed exceeding 99 percent that of light. Late last year, researchers finally solved the mystery as to how particles ejected from a black hole can travel at such high speed, with scientists arriving at the conclusion that a strong magnetic field is accelerating them. But as far rotational behavior goes, theoretical models suggest a black hole rotates aligned to an axis that is perpendicular to the orbital plane. It is also the orientation of the relativistic jets it blasts.

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But a new discovery challenges that theory. A team of researchers from the University of Turku has noticed that the black hole in the MAXI J1820+070 binary star system is highly misaligned. The team observed that the odd black hole has a