Study suggests millions of exoplanets could form near active supermassive black holes

For generations, astronomers drew a quiet boundary around the most violent regions of the cosmos, assuming that worlds could only be born in calmer corners of the universe. A new study now suggests that millions of planets may form in the swirling, radiation-scorched environments surrounding supermassive black holes — the very engines of galactic centers. This finding does not merely add a footnote to planetary science; it invites us to reconsider how generously the universe distributes the raw material of worlds, and how much of the cosmos we have been too quick to write off as barren.