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: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday November 27 2019, @03:47AM (1 child)
The old orbits wouldn't survive, but what are the odds that the sun passes close enough to a planet in just the right way to slingshot it entirely out of the grip of the black hole? (hitting the black hole is almost impossible) And how does that compare to the average number of planets that the black hole would steal from the sun? There may be a lot of planetary collisions for a while, but I'd bet that almost all the mass remains in orbit
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday November 27 2019, @04:01AM
Odds are very good that it'd either go in or go out. Stable orbits aren't exactly a razor's edge thing but they're very narrow on the scales we're talking.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.