Blanet

A blanet is a member of a hypothetical class of exoplanets that directly orbit black holes.

Blanets are fundamentally similar to other planets; they have enough mass to be rounded by their own gravity, but are not massive enough to start thermonuclear fusion and become 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.

Etymology
The team led by Keiichi Wada of Kagoshima University in Japan has given this name to black hole planets. The word is a portmanteau of black hole and planet.

Formation
Blanets are suspected to form in the accretion disk that orbits a sufficiently large black hole.

In fiction
In the episodes The Impossible Planet and The Satan Pit (both 2006) of television series Doctor Who, the plot of the episode takes place on the titular “impossible planet”, a barren blanet called Krop Tor orbiting a black hole called K37 Gem 5. In Interstellar (2014), two of the 3 terrestrial planets orbiting supermassive black hole Garguantua are proper blanets. The other one orbits a main-sequence star named Pantagruel.