It would certainly be no place like home. In any event, Bakala admits, "I don't know what sort of life could form in this sort of environment." That's because any other stray matter being sucked into the black hole would emit a blast of radiation during its death spiral powerful enough to kill any life on a nearby planet. Around larger black holes, tidal disruption doesn't happen until a star or planet is inside the event horizon, so anything outside is safe from that fate.įor an orbiting planet to thrive, the galactic center would also need to be tranquil: "an old galaxy," Bakala says, with "almost empty space" surrounding the black hole. That's because smaller supermassive black holes like the one in our Milky Way, weighing in at 4 million solar masses, tend to rip stars or planets apart with tidal forces as they approach.
The black hole would also need to be large, the team calculates, at least 163 million times the Sun's mass. But, as the researchers report in The Astrophysical Journal, for their planet to get close enough, the surface of the black hole would have to spin at less than a 100-millionth of a percent shy of the speed of light. If the black hole is spinning fast, however, close stable orbits are possible. Normally an object that close would soon get sucked in. In order to receive strong enough CMB light, a planet would need to orbit very close to the black hole's event horizon. The scientists first published this idea in 2017. On one of these bizarre planets, the researchers say, the CMB would appear as a bright star just on the edge of the black hole's shadow. At just a few degrees above absolute zero, the CMB is weak, but the extreme gravity of a supermassive black hole would scrunch the radiation into optical wavelengths and funnel it into a narrow beam. The black hole itself is an ideal heat sink, the researchers argue, and usable energy can come from the cosmic microwave background (CMB), weak radiation from the big bang that permeates space. In Interstellar, the situation is reversed: The "sun" is cold and space is hot. It's the difference between the two that drives the processes that create life. For life to evolve, a planet needs a source of usable energy (the Sun in the case of Earth) and a sink for unusable waste heat (for us, the cold of space). Astrophysicist Pavel Bakala of the Silesian University in Opava and his colleagues approached the problem by considering the thermodynamics of such worlds. The study was inspired by the 2014 film Interstellar, in which astronauts travel through a wormhole to a giant black hole and visit several planets in orbit around it. If it did, living on such a planet would be truly surreal, with the black hole filling nearly half the sky and concentrating leftover photons from the big bang into a pseudosun. So is there any way aliens could live on a world that actually orbited one of these cosmic beasts? Surprisingly, the answer is a tentative yes, researchers say, although there are plenty of reasons why life could never take hold in such a place.
Supermassive black holes have a reputation for consuming everything in their path, from gas clouds to entire solar systems.
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