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posted by martyb on Tuesday November 26 2019, @10:58AM   Printer-friendly
from the why-the-tears-TESS? dept.

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?


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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Tuesday November 26 2019, @10:01PM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Tuesday November 26 2019, @10:01PM (#925116) Journal

    Semi-large objects (such as dwarf planets) could be orbiting the Sun at least up to a couple light years away. They are at risk of being ejected by passing stars. Some of the passing stars could get as close as 0.1 light years to the Sun. Considering the extreme activity that can happen near a supermassive black hole, a huge swarm of gas giants near one should have plenty of opportunities for these interactions. And just imagine what happens when the SMBHs of 2 colliding galaxies merge.

    Only a couple of non-brown dwarf rogue planets [wikipedia.org] are confirmed, although there must be billions of them around. They are probably easier to detect than planets around black holes. The nearest known black hole candidate [wikipedia.org] is 3,000 light years away. Confirmed rogue planets are 63-80 light years away. Could it be possible to detect a rogue planet before detecting a dim stellar black hole that it orbits?

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