Despite being considered the most destructive force in space and absolutely uninhabitable, the conditions for life exist inside supermassive black holes, a Russian cosmologist has theorised.

Going out on a scientific limb somewhat, Vyacheslav Dokuchaev has even suggested that if life did exist inside the SBH, it would have evolved to become the most advanced civilisation in the galaxy. 

Supermassive black holes are such powerful gravitational forces that they suck in everything around them, including light, and nothing that crosses the black hole's 'event horizon' is ever seen again.

But now Dokuchaev, of Moscow's Institute for Nuclear Research of the Russian Academy of Sciences, says existing evidence combined with new research throws up intriguing possibilities for certain types of black holes.

Inside a charged, rotating black hole there are regions where photons can survive in stable periodic orbits. Dokuchaev specialises in studying those orbits and their dynamics

He speculates, in a paper published in Cornell University's online journal arXiv, that if there are stable orbits for photons, there is no reason why there could not be stable orbits for larger objects, such as planets.

The problem is that these stable orbits would only exist once you have crossed the threshold of the event horizon, where time and space flow into one another.

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