Study Estimates 10 Million-Plus Planets Form Around Supermassive Black Holes
Updated
Updated · New Atlas · Jun 1
Study Estimates 10 Million-Plus Planets Form Around Supermassive Black Holes
6 articles · Updated · New Atlas · Jun 1
Tens of millions of planetary-mass objects could form in the outer regions of active galactic nuclei accretion disks, according to a new Poland-US analysis posted on arXiv.
The estimate comes from modeling whether streaming instabilities—thought to help build planetesimals around stars—could also arise in magnetically stabilized disks around active supermassive black holes.
Those objects would likely be rocky and far larger than Earth, with some potentially reaching stellar mass; a minority might ignite fusion, while many would remain exotic non-stellar bodies.
The work is not yet peer-reviewed, and the researchers said observational evidence is still needed to confirm whether black-hole disks are major planet nurseries.
Could millions of giant rocky planets be hiding in the glare of supermassive black holes?
Will new telescopes soon find the first planets that are orbiting a galaxy's monstrous central black hole?
If planets can form around black holes, what other fundamental rules of the cosmos have we misunderstood?
Thousands of Planets Around Supermassive Black Holes? New Theories, Evidence, and the Future of AGN Planet Formation
Overview
For decades, supermassive black holes were seen only as destructive forces, but groundbreaking research in June 2026 challenges this view by proposing that the energetic environments around active galactic nuclei (AGN) could actually be fertile grounds for planet formation. This new perspective suggests that the immense accretion disks surrounding black holes provide ideal conditions for planets to form, shifting our understanding from black holes as cosmic destroyers to potential planet factories. This paradigm shift opens up exciting possibilities for discovering exotic worlds and fundamentally changes how we think about the origins of planets in the universe.