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February 5, 2020 03:30 am

Could a Habitable Planet Orbit a Black Hole?

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Supermassive black holes have a reputation for consuming everything in their path, from gas clouds to entire solar systems. 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. 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. It would certainly be no place like home. The deep blackness of the event horizon, looming over nearly half the sky, would be a forbidding presence. And because of the time dilation effects in Albert Einstein's theory of gravity, known as general relativity, 1 year passing on such a planet would see thousands of years go by around an ordinary star. Even if life could take hold on such a world, there's little chance of detecting it. A planet passing in front of a black hole isn't going to make it appear any dimmer when it's black already. An expert says a vast array of radio telescopes, like the one used last year to image a black hole for the first time, might be able to detect such a transit. "Technically it's not so easy, but in theory it's possible." If this idea sounds familiar, it's because it was first published in 2017. The researchers said that in order for a planet to receive strong enough cosmic microwave background (CMB) light, it would need to orbit very close to the black hole's event horizon. However, if it were too close it would get sucked in. "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," reports Science Magazine. "The black hole would also need to be large, the team calculates, at least 163 million times the Sun's mass." It would also need to be "an old galaxy" with "almost empty space" surrounding the black hole. "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," the report says.

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