Science
Simulations Show Million Planet Systems Form Around Supermassive Black Holes
StarTalk Radio
The Universe is Stranger Than We Could’ve Imagined, with Mordecai-Mark Mac Low
"If you're in a disc around a super massive black hole, a 100 million times as massive as the sun, there's an awful lot of dust in that disc and it's awful large. And you don't form three planets or eight planets, you form a million planets."
In newly accepted research, Mac Low and collaborators demonstrate that supermassive black holes can spawn planetary systems containing a million Jupiter-mass rocky planets. These extreme environments create solid planets far larger and denser than anything in our solar system, though the intense X-ray and gamma radiation would be hostile to life as we know it.
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