As new research resurfaced, we learn that the possibility of thousands of planets around supermassive black holes might exist. Keiichi Wada explains: “With the right conditions, planets could be formed even in harsh environments, such as around a black hole.”
The professor is part of a research team that analyzes the active galactic nuclei, bright objects stimulated by black holes. Recent theories show that planets are created from soft dust aggregates in a protoplanetary disk around a newborn star. These types of stars, however, are not the only space objects that got dust disks. Researchers focused on massive discs nearby supermassive black holes in the nuclei of galaxies.
Eiichiro Kokubo, professor at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, added that “our calculations show that tens of thousands of planets with ten times the mass of the Earth could be formed around ten light-years from a black hole.”
Planets Might Exist Around Supermassive Black Holes
Some supermassive black holes hold enormous amounts of matter around them in the form of a large, thick disk. And a disk can have as much dust as 100,000 times the volume of the sun. Such a fact represents 1 billion times the dust amount of a protoplanetary disk.
Also, in a reduced temperature area of a protoplanetary disk, dust particles with ice coverings stick together and become fluffy aggregates. A dust disk nearby a black hole is so thick that the excessive radiation from the core is stopped, and low-temperature areas are created.
What the researchers did was to apply the planet creation theory to circumnuclear disks and discovered that planets could develop over many hundred million years. Unfortunately, we don’t have the necessary techniques to identify these planets around supermassive black holes, but we could hope for future change.