COULD LIFE EXIST AROUND BLACK HOLES?

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From the coldest to the hottest regions, life on Earth has filled every conceivable ecological niche. It’s very likely life has evolved elsewhere, though despite our best efforts we haven’t seen any signs of it yet. What is truly amazing is that scientists have speculated that life could exist on planets in the neighbourhood of black holes.

Black holes are the most extreme and awe-inspiring objects in the universe. At the centre of virtually every galaxy, including our own Milky Way, resides a menacing black hole that greedily consumes everything that falls into it – from vast dust clouds and planets to whole solar systems.

In the early evolution of galaxy formation, stellar material spinning around black holes formed flattened accretion discs billions of times the mass of our Sun, and great jets of gas fired out from them. These jets are like powerful beacons, 1,000 times brighter than our Milky Way, and are known as quasars. Much of the gas that fuelled quasars has run out in mature galaxies, but quasars can still be observed in very distant young galaxies.

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