One topic that people always ask astronomers about is black holes. These seemingly mysterious and bizarre objects are known to gobble up everything around them, even light, and physics as we know it cannot accurately describe what goes on inside.
From the outside, however, we consider black holes to be pretty simple objects, described completely by their mass, or size, its spin, and charge. This is often called the "no-hair" theorem of black holes.
For the most part, something that massive is almost certainly neutral, so astronomers really only care about how big a black hole is and how fast it is spinning.
As you might imagine, actually measuring these quantities can be a bit tricky, as by definition, the black hole doesn't give off any light of its own. But researchers are pretty darn clever, and three recent papers detail the precise experiments to measure these quantities with telescopes that range across the electromagnetic spectrum for Cygnus X-1 system. This is a binary system comprised of a black hole and a massive blue giant star.
Read More: http://news.discovery.com/space/measuring-a-teeny-tiny-massive-black-hole-111202.html
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