Artist's impression of the view of the sky from a planet orbiting inside the dust disk around the supermassive black hole in the center of the galaxy NGC 4261.
The team led by Keiichi Wada of Kagoshima University in Japan has given this name to black hole planets.[4] The word is a portmanteau of black hole and planet.
Formation
Blanets are suspected to form in the accretion disk that orbits a sufficiently large black hole, provided the disk is relatively dim.[3][5][6]Radiation feedback from the black hole could rotationally disrupt large dust grains in its accretion disk, causing them to break apart and preventing the formation of blanets.[6]
Properties
Blanets around supermassive black holes formed by the hole's accretion disk are likely to be at least 20 Earth masses and may have very long orbital periods to the order of hundreds of thousands of years. Despite their large mass relative to Earth, it would be difficult for blanets to gain a sufficient atmosphere in order to become gas giants due to Bondi accretion by the black hole.[3]
The two-part episodes "The Impossible Planet" and "The Satan Pit" (2006) of the British television series Doctor Who take place on the titular “impossible planet”, a barren planet called Krop Tor orbiting a black hole called K37 Gem 5.[11]
In Interstellar (2014), two of the 3 terrestrial planets orbiting supermassive black hole Gargantua are proper blanets. The other one orbits a main-sequence star.[12][13]
^ abSchnittman, Jeremy (24 September 2019). "Life on Miller's Planet: The Habitable Zone Around Supermassive Black Holes". arXiv:1910.00940 [physics.pop-ph].
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