Spinning black holes

Things get pretty weird near a black hole, and even more so if it is spinning raidly. The problem is that things falling into a black hole crash around a lot before they vanish, and the debris and energy flying around make it hard to see much inside.

NGC 1365 seems to have a supermassive black hole in it, and ionized iron in its vicinity. The spectrum from the radiating iron has some odd features: are they due to the "frame dragging" around the spinning black hole or some interference from the clouds? Two X-ray space observatories, NASA’s Nuclear Spectroscopic Telescope Array (NuSTAR) and the European Space Agency’s XMM-Newton teamed up to determine that the clouds don't seem to be playing a major role.

If that is true, and the odd features in the iron spectrum are due to general relativistic effects around the black hole, then the thing must be spinning so fast that at its radius it must be moving at nearly the speed of light. I guess you have to collide two black holes or something equally dramatic to get the final one spinning that fast.

One way you can think of the weirdness is that orbiting the thing in one direction is slower than orbiting in the other; time doesn't work exactly the same way in both directions. Yes, it gives me a headache too.