Spun to the Limit: Black Hole Bypasses Laws ✎ express
The third law of black hole mechanics, proposed by Stephen Hawking, forbids a hole from spinning up to its limit in finite time — much like a whirlpool would need an eternity to reach absolute speed. Yet numerical simulations in five dimensions break this rule.
Simulations showed that a non-rotating hole can accelerate to its extreme all by itself. Moreover, such a vortex can spring directly from empty space — with no initial matter at all. It's as if a perfect whirlpool were to suddenly appear in a calm ocean, flouting the laws of hydrodynamics. The discovery shakes the analogy between gravity and heat: rules once thought unshakable lose their grip in higher-dimensional worlds.
The third law of black hole mechanics was born from thermodynamics: there, absolute zero temperature is unreachable in a finite number of steps. For black holes, extremal rotation corresponds to zero temperature. Now it turns out this threshold can be reached without a long buildup.