What thousands of planets around the supermassive black holes?

A lightning fast "star flight" could confirm the existence of a new type of hole negroEncuentran an object around a black hole, whose existence was believed imposibleDescubren a black hole the size of Jupiter circling our galaxy

Typically, planets orbit around stars. Some even travel solo, as true vagabonds of space, expelled from their solar systems by some event or violent by the "kick of gravity" of a star too active. It has even toyed with the idea of planets are able to orbit around a black hole small, stellar-mass. But no one (until now) I had thought that it was possible to find orbiting planets directly around supermassive black holes , those who live in the centers of galaxies and are millions, even billions of times more másivos the Sun.

The extravagant idea, however, has it ever occurred to the astronomer Keiichi Wada, the japanese university of Kagoshima. Together with other members of your team, Wada decided to see what was happening, to apply the current models of planetary formation to the violent environment of supermassive black holes. And their results, which can be found in the new study, published in arXiv.org were all a surprise.

In the words of Wada, "this is the first work that allows for a possibility of direct formation of objects similar to planets that are not associated to the stars, but supermassive black holes".

time Dilation

Typically, the formation of a planet begins with a disk of gas and dust spinning around a star. With time, all this material, driven by gravity, it goes by pooling slowly in "pieces" is more and more big, until become a planet itself.

Wada and his team, by contrast, chose to study how to cheat the disks of material that are known to surround many supermassive black holes. And came to the conclusion that the process of planetary formation could work. "Basically -explains Wada - is the same as the formation of planets normal about the stars." Although with some differences.

Due to its enormous mass and gravitational pull, supermassive black holes have the ability to warp the space time around you, so that would be a serious problem for the birth of new worlds. But according to Wada, the planets do not feel anything strange (like time dilation), because those worlds orbitarían very far from black holes, to distances ranging between 10 and 30 light years, where the extreme effects of general relativity would be "insignificant".

Ten times the Earth

of course, these hypothetical planetary systems would not be as those that form around the stars. "The amount of dust -says-Wada - is huge, and that means that the mass is typical of those planets would be, probably, very large, of the order of 10 times that of the Earth. According to the scientist, in addition, there could be up to 10,000 of them around a single supermassive black hole.

Other researchers have already been fixed in the original work of Wada, and considered that something like this would be perfectly possible. Some even think that if it were the case that the planets were formed closer to the black hole of what he believes Wada, their number could be much higher, even of millions.

Now, of course, is the most difficult. The theoretical model seems robust and it works, but someone, sometime, will have to find and to observe one of these planets to confirm they really exist. Something that, with current technology, it is not possible because of the great distance to which the supermassive black holes. Wada, however, believe that we would have any chance of detecting them using the astronomy from infrared to locate the proto-planetary discs. Time will tell...

Date Of Update: 25 September 2019, 01:01