Thousands of planets may form and orbit around the kind of supermassive black holes found in the cores of most, if not all, galaxies, a new study finds.
“Planets are not only orbiting around stars, but also around supermassive black holes,” study lead author Keiichi Wada, an astrophysicist at Kagoshima University in Japan, told Space.com.
When new stars form, the clouds of gas and dust around them collapse to form disks. Previous research suggested that planets originate within these “protoplanetary disks” as gravity pulls clumps of matter together into larger masses; the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) has mapped 20 such planet-building disks around nearby stars to extraordinary detail.
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