Spinning massive objects drag spacetime along with them. This curious phenomenon is an important prediction in general relativity, which has been confirmed from a variety of celestial bodies and events. The latest one comes from a supermassive black hole pulling a star apart. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

You can imagine that a massive spinning object twists spacetime as it spins. This has been measured on Earth and around Jupiter with the Juno mission, and even around pulsars . A black hole weighing 5 million times the mass of the Sun, such as the one we're talking about, will exhibit much stronger frame-dragging, as it is called, than our planet – but seeing it at a distance has not been easy.

Black holes are

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