Recently , the possibility that several starless telluric planets may form around supermassive black holes ( SMBHs ) receiving an energy input from the hole ’ s accretion disk , which , under certain not implausible circumstances , may make them habitable in a terrestrial sense , has gained increasing attention .
In particular , an observer on a planet orbiting at distance r = 100 Schwarzschild radii from a maximally rotating Kerr SMBH with mass M _ { \bullet } = 1 \times 10 ^ { 8 } \mathrm { M } _ { \odot } in a plane slightly outside the equator of the latter would see the gravitationally lensed accretion disk having the same size of the Sun as seen from the Earth .
Moreover , the accretion rate might be imagined to be set in such a way that the apparent disk ’ s temperature would be identical to that of the solar surface .
We demonstrate that the post-Newtonian ( pN ) de Sitter and Lense-Thirring precessions of the spin axis of such a world would rapidly change , among other things , its tilt \varepsilon to its orbital plane by tens to hundreds of degrees over a time span of , say , just \Delta t = 400 \mathrm { yr } , strongly depending on the obliquity \eta _ { \bullet } of the SMBH ’ s spin to the orbital plane .
Thus , such relativistic features would have per se a relevant impact on the long term habitability of the considered planet .
It is plausible arguing that much stronger effects would likely alter the sky as seen from the fictional planets appearing in the movie Interstellar , which orbit much closer to the event horizon of the SMBH Gargantua .