A podcast that we love to listen to is SciShow Tangents, which recently had a podcast on Black Holes. Something that they mention was what a planet spinning around a black hole would look like, which is called a Blanet!

It is worth noting that the name Blanet is what is sounds like, a portmanteau of the words black hole and planet.

A Blanet is only hypothetical, as none have been found to exist so far. The name Blanet was given to these phenomenal by a team led by Keiichi Wada of Kagoshima University in Japan.[1]

Blanets are fundamentally similar to planets; they have enough mass to be rounded by their own gravity, but are not massive enough to start thermonuclear fusion, just like planets that orbit stars. In 2019, a team of astronomers and exoplanetologists showed that there is a safe zone around a supermassive black hole that could harbor thousands of planets in orbit around it. The paper was published and is available online for those who would like to read the paper. https://arxiv.org/abs/2007.15198

Currently, scientists have only found evidence that Blanets could exist, but have not necessarily found any planets yet. Maybe with some additional studies on Black Holes, these curious celestial objects will be discovered!

This does remind me of other interestingly named phenomena such as Ploonets, which are tidally detached exomoons. That sounds like something that would be fun to look into.

Sources

[1] = https://www.sciencealert.com/we-have-ploonets-we-have-moonmoons-now-hold-onto-your-hats-for-blanets