Wednesday, August 5, 2020

What in Space is a Blanet?

No, there shouldn't be a k in there.

"Blanet" is a proposed term for...a planet orbiting a black hole. It turns out that if we understand planetary formation correctly, planets could form out of the accretion disk of a black hole if it is large enough.

Like, say, the ones at the center of the galaxy.

The planets would form not in the radioactive "main" accretion disk, but in a second disk further out. Because of the scale, they would be rather larger than the planets we're familiar with, ranging from about the size of Neptune all the way up, for larger black holes, into brown dwarf territory.

They wouldn't exactly be prime real estate, though...they would probably be about as likely to host life as "rogue" planets.

But they would be interesting to study. Or, well...science fiction can find some interesting ways here.

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