Jeffrey E. McClintock studies black holes through the X-rays emitted by their accreting gas. In work on GRS 1915+105, his team fitted a relativistic accretion disk model to the thermal continuum and inferred a rapidly rotating Kerr black hole.
The inference depends on connecting the fitted inner emitting scale to the black hole's spin. The study selected relatively low-luminosity thermal-state data, where a thin accretion disk was an appropriate approximation, and included changes between local emission and the measured radiation spectrum. It reported a dimensionless spin exceeding 0.98 within that modeling framework.[ref]
The Spin of the Near-Extreme Kerr Black Hole GRS 1915+105 by Jeffrey E. McClintock and others. Abstract: thermal-state selection, relativistic disk fit, luminosity restriction and spin bound
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