Supermassive black holes (SMBHs) are theorised to be present at the centres of galaxies across the universe. They are Herculean celestial objects that consume gas and dust via an accretion disc and burp out jets of X-ray radiation from their core - jets so powerful they can be spotted from billions of light years away. This doesn’t sound like a hospitable environment for planets, but recent research led by Dr Keiichi Wada, an astrophysicist at Kagoshima University in Japan, suggests it could be.
Wada and his research team believe that there could be tens of thousands of these black hole planets, or ‘blanets’, at the heart of the Milky Way. The formation of a planet is a complicated transition from small clumps of debris to enormous orbs of rock, gas and liquid. It’s an even trickier process around a SMBH since not all of these circumnuclear discs can accommodate planet formation. These regions are far less dense than what is found around young stars, and the emissions near a black hole’s event horizon can prevent gas and ice from accreting effectively.
“WADA THEORISES THAT BLANETS CAN FORM BEYOND THE SNOW LINE AND FORM ROCKY PLANETS”