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And neither would they be much like Earth. “The gaseous envelope of a blanet should be negligibly small compared with the blanet mass,” they say. Wada and co say they cannot be gaseous giants like Jupiter or Neptune. Just what these bodies would be like is an open question. “Our results suggest that blanets could be formed around relatively low-luminosity active galactic nuclei during their lifetime,” say Wada and co. Without this dust wind, blanets would grow to no more than six times the mass of Earth. Under these conditions, blanets grow faster and can reach sizes up to 3,000 times the mass of Earth (beyond which they would be massive enough to form brown dwarfs). That has a significant impact, say Wada and co. The radiation from an active galactic nucleus would tend to drive dust particles away from the black hole, creating a constant “wind” of fresh material for blanet formation. The focus of the team’s current work is on just such a factor: the impact of radiation on the dust cloud.
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That leaves just a small parameter of space in which blanets can form, unless there is another factor that promotes blanet formation. Wada and co calculated that this critical velocity must be less than about 80 meters per second.Īt the same time, the rate of collisions must be high enough for blanets to form during the lifetime of an active galactic nuclei, thought to be perhaps a hundred million years. Slow moving particles can collide and stick together, but fast-moving ones would constantly break apart in high-speed collisions. An important limitation is the relative velocity of the dust particles in the cloud. Next the team considered how large these bodies might grow. Birthdays on blanets would be few and far between! This turns out to be around 100 trillion kilometers from the black hole itself, in an orbit that takes about a million years to complete. But ice particles can only form where it is cool enough for volatile compounds to condense. Supermassive black holes are huge, at least a hundred thousand times the mass of our Sun. The scale of this process is vast compared to conventional planet formation. As the cloud orbits the black hole, dust particles should collide and stick together forming larger clumps that eventually become blanets. These are surrounded by huge clouds of dust and gas that bear some similarities to the protoplanetary disks around young stars. Wada and co say a similar process should occur around supermassive black holes. Eventually, these clumps grow large enough to become planets. When dust particles collide, they stick together to form larger clumps that sweep up more dust as they orbit the star. The generally agreed theory of planet formation is that it occurs in the protoplanetary disk of gas and dust around young stars. These black hole planets, or blanets as the team call them, would be quite unlike any conventional planet and raise the possibility of an entirely new class of objects for astronomers to dream about. Last year, Keichi Wada at Kagoshima University in Japan, and a couple of colleagues showed that under certain conditions planets ought to form in these clouds. Now researchers have a new phenomenon to consider - the idea that planets can form in the massive clouds of dust and gas around supermassive black holes. Discovering the properties of these clouds, and their curious central residents, is an ongoing exercise for astrophysicists. When this happens, they are called active galactic nuclei. They are often surrounded by thick clouds of gas that radiate vast amounts of energy. Supermassive black holes are at least a hundred thousand times the mass of our Sun. Indeed, they may be the seeds from which all galaxies grow.
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These are the giant, massive bodies that sit at the heart of most, perhaps all, galaxies. Supermassive black holes are among the most exciting and puzzling objects in the universe.