As if the menagerie of known worlds in the Milky Way weren’t strange enough, now there might be solar systems forming within three light-years of the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy. This harsh environment is a dangerous place for planets, which risk getting torn away by the black hole if they even form at all.
A newfound cache of 44 blobs of gas sits in a sea of molecular clouds swirling around the black hole, a monster weighing roughly as much as 4 million suns. The blobs are probably low-mass stars ringed by dusty, planet-forming disks, Farhad Yusef-Zadeh, an astrophysicist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., and colleagues report in the March 10 Astrophysical Journal Letters.