{"id":636043,"date":"2026-08-14T02:01:13","date_gmt":"2026-08-14T02:01:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/636043\/"},"modified":"2026-08-14T02:01:13","modified_gmt":"2026-08-14T02:01:13","slug":"dusty-accretion-disks-around-supermassive-black-holes-may-be-secret-planet-factories","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/636043\/","title":{"rendered":"Dusty Accretion Disks around Supermassive Black Holes May Be Secret Planet Factories"},"content":{"rendered":"

Astronomers from New Mexico State University, Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center and CUNY Borough of Manhattan Community College propose that the dust-rich tori surrounding active galactic nuclei (AGN) \u2014 the energetic cores of galaxies powered by feeding supermassive black holes \u2014 behave much like the protoplanetary disks that spawn planets around young stars.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Mishra<\/a><\/p>\n

Mishra et al. suggest that AGN dust tori host the largest populations of planets in the Universe. Image credit: ESO.<\/p>\n

\u201cPlanets form within disks of gas and dust surrounding young stars,\u201d said New Mexico State University astrophysicist Wladimir Lyra and his colleagues.<\/p>\n

\u201cHowever, an additional and compelling environment for planet formation has emerged: the disks surrounding AGN.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIn recent years, significant analogies have been drawn between the physical processes within circumstellar disks and within AGN disks.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThese analogies suggest that mechanisms traditionally associated with planet formation may also operate in the more extreme environments of disks around supermassive black holes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Using computer modeling of a strongly magnetized AGN disk, the researchers found that dust grains a few nanometers to a fraction of a millimeter across, drifting in from the interstellar medium, can coagulate and trigger a process called the streaming instability.<\/p>\n

This mechanism concentrates dust into dense filaments that collapse under their own gravity, seeding objects ranging from Earth-mass bodies to super-Jupiters, and, in some cases, objects at or beyond the hydrogen-burning limit, the threshold at which an object is massive enough to become a star.<\/p>\n

The scientists estimate that such disks could host on the order of tens of millions of planetary-mass objects, with pebble accretion and gas accretion driving continued growth over the roughly 1-to-10-million-year lifetime of an AGN episode.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re finding objects that are a thousand times the mass of the Earth, but built of pure dust,\u201d Dr. Lyra said.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd not only that, but also some of these objects are approaching the mass of the Sun.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe came up with the hypothesis that low mass black holes orbiting the disk around supermassive black holes would behave just like planetary embryos, protoplanets behave around the Sun.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThey would migrate, they would change their orbit, they would collide with other protoplanets and make bigger things.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s a completely different way to form heavy black holes than anything else in the Universe.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019ve worked out this idea into a full-fledged theory. It\u2019s known as the \u2018AGN channel\u2019 and it has accumulated compelling observational evidence.\u201d<\/p>\n

Because that growth can push some objects in AGN disks past the hydrogen-burning limit, the mechanism amounts to a new pathway for star formation.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is a mechanism of forming stars that we discovered for the first time,\u201d Dr. Lyra said.<\/p>\n

\u201cStars usually form in what we call gravitational collapse. It\u2019s top down. You form the gas, you have this big cloud of gas, it\u2019s too dense so it collapses under its own weight. Normally, you start with something big, and it collapses to form a star.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cOur mechanism is the opposite. You form from the bottom up. You first form the building blocks and then accrete gas and then boom, you form a star.\u201d<\/p>\n

These newly formed stars could themselves collapse into black holes, potentially merging into heavyweight black holes detectable by future gravitational-wave observatories such as ESA\u2019s Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), expected to launch in the mid-2030s.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese black holes are ginormous,\u201d said Dr. Bhupendra Mishra of Santa Fe Preparatory School.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey\u2019re hundreds or thousands of times the size of the Sun, and if they start to move towards the center, they also produce a signal which will be detected probably by LISA, which is a gravitational wave signal.\u201d<\/p>\n

The study<\/a> appears in the Astrophysical Journal.<\/p>\n

_____<\/p>\n

Bhupendra Mishra et al. 2026. Active Galactic Nucleus Tori: Potential Birthplace to Millions of Planets. ApJ 1005, 99; doi: 10.3847\/1538-4357\/ae6f0b<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Astronomers from New Mexico State University, Nicolaus Copernicus Astronomical Center and CUNY Borough of Manhattan Community College propose…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":636044,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[77],"tags":[1204,63596,96050,3514,38025,18,6145,18060,7443,19,17,6605,28709,107621,133,6552,268804,5610],"class_list":["post-636043","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-science","tag-planet","tag-accretion-disk","tag-active-galactic-nucleus","tag-black-hole","tag-dust","tag-eire","tag-esa","tag-exoplanet","tag-galaxy","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-lisa","tag-planet-formation","tag-planetesimal","tag-science","tag-supermassive-black-hole","tag-torus","tag-universe"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@ie\/117091400859902368","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/636043","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=636043"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/636043\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/636044"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=636043"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=636043"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=636043"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}