A popular myth about black holes is that they act like giant cosmic vacuum cleaners, sucking in everything around them. But Wladimir Lyra’s research found a new mechanism around supermassive black holes that is more like a cosmic nursery, giving birth to planets more massive than Jupiter.
“We’re finding objects that are a thousand times the mass of the Earth, but built of pure dust,” Lyra said. “And not only that, but also some of these objects are approaching the mass of the sun.”
Lyra, an associate professor of astronomy at New Mexico State University, began this line of research as a postdoctoral fellow collaborating with Barry McKernan, Saavik Ford and Mordecai-Mark Mac Low at the American Museum of Natural History in 2010.
Bhupendra Mishr...
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