Is life possible around black holes ? 🤨🧐🧐🤨

 There's a lot of energy there for organisms to tap.

We are thinking of possible homes for life on the stars orbiting the sun on the water world, but a new research paper has found a new possible habitat: a rocky planet that is a fast-moving supermajor The black hole is orbiting the rear of the event horizon.

The alien forces around that black hole are capable of heating the planet properly, but the landscape comes with a catch: the planet must be circled at the speed of light.

Habitat for humanity

habitat for Humanity

We do not know all the possible places that life can arise in our universe, because so far we have only one example: us. While scientists (and sci-fi writers) enjoy thinking about all kinds of foreign arrangements and possibilities for life-philosophy, for serious discoveries of supernatural intelligence, our best bet is to give our circumstances a Use as a template, not hunting for life. We are very much dissatisfied with everything we find on Earth.

From this we can draw two very broad requirements. One, liquid water is required for life like ours. Water is the most common molecule in the universe, composed of hydrogen (element number 1 when it comes into abundance in the universe) and oxygen (a by-product of fusion reactions inside our sun-like stars, making it also very common). But that water usually either evaporates into the plasma (and is therefore very bad for life) or stops in its solid, frozen state as ice (also not very good for life).

It is difficult to come by liquid stuff, and requires a source of heat that is not so hot that the water simply evaporates. We have found this perfect balance in only two types of places: the so-called "habitable zone" of stars, a band of orbits, where light produces it right; And some of the outer planets in our solar system are buried under the icy crust of the moons, where tidal heat generates the necessary energy.

But just raw heat is not enough. Life is a complex process that uses energy to do interesting things (such as moving around, eating and breeding). All those processes are not completely efficient, so they produce waste heat. This waste heat must be safely thrown away from the environment; Otherwise, you end up with nightmares of greenhouse scenarios, with temperatures rising to uncontrolled levels and killing any life that begins.

On Earth, we dump our waste heat in the vacuum of space as infrared radiation. This contrast, between a source of energy and a place to store all the waste, enables life on our home planet to thrive, and possibly another planet with a similar setup.

Warm monsters

At first glance, black holes appear in the least inviting homes for any possible life. After all, they are objects made up of pure gravity, pulling anything that reaches too close to their event horizon, locking them away from contact with the rest of the universe forever. Nothing, not even light, can survive their gravitational movement.

Black holes do not illuminate themselves - they are black, after all - but that unavoidable gravity can render them a wonder, unique throughout the universe.

Allowing the universe is something called the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB). CMB is the leftover radiation when the universe was just a child, only 380,000 years old. It is, by far, the largest source of radiation in the entire universe, easily swallowing all stars and galaxies by several orders of magnitude. The reason for this is not that it is primarily in the microwave field of the electromagnetic spectrum (hence the name).

In other words, CMB is colder, with temperatures about 3 degrees above zero.

But as the CMB light falls into a black hole, it collides with extreme gravity and becomes blue by colliding with high energy. Before it collides with the event horizon, CMB light can receive so much energy that it also transfers to the infrared, visible, and ultraviolet parts of the spectrum.

In other words, near the black hole, the CMB stops cooling, and becomes very, very hot.

What's more, if the black hole is spinning, it is able to focus the light into a narrow beam, making the CMB appear as a single spot on the sky. Like the sun.

Goldilocks

So if you are able to get close to a black hole, you will find yourself surprisingly warm, and if you are a planet, you can simply convert your water ice into oceans of liquid water - life's A possible house for.

But for life to thrive, it also needs a heat sink, which can only be provided by black holes. Closer to the black hole, gravitational distortions increase the appearance of the event horizon, making it much larger than the swelling you would hardly think.

Close enough to the black hole (at a radius less than 1% of the event horizon), the hot CMB shrinks to fill only a small disk, while the event horizon swells to cover 40% of the sky. If your planet is rotating, you have "sun" and "night" - and life has everything it needs to do its business.

But revolutions in this realm are usually extremely unstable, leading to all kinds of terrible blackness. Recently, a team of researchers published an analysis in The Astrophysical Journal to ascertain if there is a way to stabilize the condition.

And they found a way to make it work. If the black hole is large, at least 1.6x108 times the mass of the sun, and rotates rapidly, it hosts a "habitable zone" just above the event horizon, where the CMB light in the UV portion of the spectrum Reaches peaks hot, but not terrible. Any planet and planets will be destroyed by excessive gravitational forces, and any far away and CMB will be very cold. But in that narrow band? just right.

While this scenario is possible, it would not be very beautiful. The planet has to orbit at the speed of light, which experiences a dispersion factor of thousands of times - meaning that for every second that goes into that world, the hours will move for us. And who knows if a planet can reach close to a black hole even while it is alive.

Nevertheless, work shows that we have to keep our minds open when it comes to life and potential homes for some of the most terrifying environments of the universe.

Image source : Space.com