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According to current prevailing theories, planets are believed to be be formed by rotating disks of gas and dust surrounding stars dubbed Protoplanetary Disks. Researchers have now calculated that similar disks around black holes can form planets as well. The researchers applied planetary formation theory to the heavy circumnuclear disks surrounding supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies.
According to Keiichi Wada, a professor at Kagoshima University in Japan, planets could form under the right conditions — even around black holes — within a few hundred million years.
Some supermassive black holes have large amounts of matter around them in the form of a heavy, dense disk. A disk can contain as much as a hundred thousand times the mass of the Sun worth of dust. This is a billion times the dust mass of a protoplanetary disk.
That's plenty of mass to form a typical solar system and then some, but they aren't talking about anything so small.
"Our calculations show that tens of thousands of planets with 10 times the mass of the Earth could be formed around 10 light-years from a black hole," says Eiichiro Kokubo, a professor at the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan who studies planet formation. "Around black holes there might exist planetary systems of astonishing scale."
Neither wobble watching nor dimming discernment have any chance of detecting these potentially gargantuan planetary systems. Do Soylentils have any ideas?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by acid andy on Tuesday November 26 2019, @11:27AM (2 children)
Fascinating. Is it possible that Hawking radiation would provide a black hole with a Goldilocks zone, warm enough to support life but far enough away to be safe from the tidal forces?
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 4, Informative) by c0lo on Tuesday November 26 2019, @11:44AM
Nope. The higher the mass, the less intense the Hawking-radiation. Besides, the proportionality constant is so small (6e-8) [ucr.edu] that even Pluto would emit more thermal radiation than an astronomical black hole.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 5, Informative) by takyon on Tuesday November 26 2019, @11:58AM
Hawking radiation from a stellar black hole won't heat up your tea kettle. I think your best bet is to support life through tidal forces (of a gas giant, not the black hole) alone. So maybe a moon of a gas giant could get sufficient heating to support an internal ocean. Obviously, this could apply to a bunch of different planetary systems, not just systems around black holes.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]