'Giant Saucer Stones' Landscape Feature, Boulsworth Hill, Briercliffe, Lancashire.

Euler’s identity - beauty in its purest form.

Titan Moon of Saturn

Image credit: NASA/JPL (precessed by Stuart Rankin and Mike Malaska)

Blanet: A new class of planet that could form around black holes

The dust clouds around supermassive black holes are the perfect breeding ground for an exotic new type of planet.

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 blanets in orbit around it.

The generally agreed theory of planet formation is that it occurs in the protoplanetary disk of gas and dust around young stars. When dust particles collide, they stick together to form larger clumps that sweep up more dust as they orbit the star. Eventually, these clumps grow large enough to become planets.

A similar process should occur around supermassive black holes. These are surrounded by huge clouds of dust and gas that bear some similarities to the protoplanetary disks around young stars. As the cloud orbits the black hole, dust particles should collide and stick together forming larger clumps that eventually become blanets.

The scale of this process is vast compared to conventional planet formation. Supermassive black holes are huge, at least a hundred thousand times the mass of our Sun. But ice particles can only form where it is cool enough for volatile compounds to condense.

This turns out to be around 100 trillion kilometers from the black hole itself, in an orbit that takes about a million years to complete. Birthdays on blanets would be few and far between!

An important limitation is the relative velocity of the dust particles in the cloud. Slow moving particles can collide and stick together, but fast-moving ones would constantly break apart in high-speed collisions. Wada and co calculated that this critical velocity must be less than about 80 meters per second.

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Raging Bear Creek Falls by Andrew Morse

How many people can say they have played rugby with a Beluga whale? 🐳 🏉

Alright.

Unprecedented footage from Costa Rica shows tiny tropical lizard (Water Anole) “breathing” from an air sac suspended atop their snouts—an apparent scuba tank that helps them stay submerged for extended periods.

As the lizards lie motionless underwater, bubbles can periodically be seen appearing above their snouts. The bubbles quickly expand in size, and then shrink. It may very well be a form of underwater respiration, in which oxygen is pulled from the recycled air bubble on the lizard’s head, though further research will be required to validate these visual observations.

the limits of the universe