Planets Orbiting Black Holes Could Harbor Life
“The black holes of nature are the most perfect macroscopic objects there are in the universe –the only elements in their construction are our concepts of space and time,” said Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, the Noble-Prize winning, Indian-American astrophysicist NASA’s Chandra X-Ray Observatory was named for.
Astronomers are speculating that planets by the thousands may be orbiting in a “safe zone” captured by the massive gravitational force of these paradoxical, terrifying, “perfectly constructed” spacetime objects. In 2019, Harvard’s Avi Loeb and NASA’s Jeremy Schnittman, suggested that inhabited planets might exist around the black holes harbored at the center of most galaxies similar to the fictional waterworld planet orbiting the supermassive black hole Gargantua in the movie Interstellar.
It’s possible, they suggested, that extreme forms of life life may form on some of these planets.”We have known since the 1990s that planets exist around pulsars”, said Harvard’s Loeb. “It’s reasonable to assume that planets might also exist around black holes, which, perhaps surprisingly, have a much weaker impact on their environment than pulsars.”
Inhabited planets, says Loeb, might exist around the black holes that lie at the cores of most galaxies. It’s even possible that life may form on some of these planets, given that organisms on Earth have adapted to extreme conditions, including boiling heat, freezing cold, and acidic, highly salty and even radioactive environments.”
“Microbial Astronauts”
We know that Earthly microbes such as Bacillus subtilis, Caenorhabditis elegans, Deinococcus radiodurans, Escherichia coli and Paracoccus denitrificans have been shown to live through accelerations just one order of magnitude smaller than millions of gs. If these mini astronauts, suggests Loeb, could survive a ride through the Interstellar medium of the Milky Way who knows what could exist on a safe-zone planet.
Earth’s most indestructible species, the extremophile, tardigrade, an eight-legged micro-animal, will survive until the Sun dies, according to a 2017 Oxford University collaboration, The Resilience of Life to Astrophysical Events, begs the question: what else is out there? “Tardigrades are as close to indestructible as it gets on Earth,” the researchers reported, “but it is possible that there are other resilient species examples elsewhere in the universe.”
