BLANETS
– SCI & TECH
News:
Blanets: worlds around
black holes
What's
in the news?
●
A 2019 study by a Japanese scientist
theorised that planets could also be formed in the massive dust and gas clouds
found near supermassive black holes.
Blanets:
●
It is a theoretical type of planet that orbits around a black hole instead
of a star or brown dwarf.
●
Blanets would be unlike any conventional
planet and could emerge an entire new
class of objects in astronomical science.
Formation
of Blanets:
●
They could be formed around relatively low-luminosity active galactic nuclei
during their lifetime.
Process:
●
It would be similar to planet formation as
a black hole is surrounded by massive amounts of dust and gas which bears
similarities to protoplanetary disks around young stars.
Distance:
●
Blanets would need to form around 100 trillion kilometres away from a black
hole to survive.
Scale
of the Process:
●
A blanet would need to form during the lifetime of active galactic nuclei
(around a hundred million years) thus possessing a really short window for
formation.
Relative
Velocity of the Dust Particles:
●
The critical velocity of the dust
particles in the cloud must be less than about 80 meters per second with the
rate of collisions being higher than for a conventional planet.
Characteristics
of Blanets:
1.
Large Size:
●
They grow faster and can reach sizes up to
3,000 times the mass of Earth
because of the constant wind of fresh dust material supplied by the radiations
from the active galactic nuclei
●
Without this dust wind, blanets would grow
to no more than six times the mass of Earth
2.
Orbital Period:
●
Blanets will have an extremely long orbital period, taking around a
million years to complete an orbital revolution.
3.
Differentiation:
●
The gaseous envelope of a blanet should be
negligibly small compared with the blanet mass therefore they cannot be like
Jupiter or Neptune.
Go
back to basics:
Formation
of Planets:
●
Planets are formed of protoplanetary disks
of gas and dust surrounding the young stars.
●
These
dust particles are rich in carbon and iron which helps form planetary systems.
●
They collide and stick together to form
larger clumps that sweep up more dust as they orbit the star.
Planetesimals:
●
Over billions of years, these clumps known
as planetesimals grow large enough to become planets.