A monster black hole rotates at roughly half the speed of light, astronomers reported on Wednesday, twisting space as it turns. (Read "Star Eater" in National Geographic magazine.)

Most galaxies, including our own spiral Milky Way, possess such monster black holes. Located at the center of a quasar galaxy some 6.1 billion light-years away, the jumbo black hole in the study, which is about 200 million times as massive as our sun, is the most distant one with its spin revealed to astronomers.

"It is spinning like a top, very rapidly," says Nature study co-author Mark Reynolds of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor.

And the study quasar is at least four times farther away than any other galaxy