The Spin on Black Holes

There's a black hole out there whose mass is two million times that of our sun, and we're going to measure how fast it's spinning. We've not been able to do that before because, we thought, of gases that distort what we're able to see, but two X-ray space observatories working together are penetrating the clouds. As it turns out (pun intentional), it's not gases at all that are obscuring our view (story and slideshow): http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-075&cid=release_2013-075