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Baby salamander blob
It doesn't get much blobbier than cells, not to mention that they were the first blobs ever to exist. This particular cell blob is a baby salamander in the making, all the way from a single cell to a fully developed creature. This incredible time lapse is actually a compilation of thousands of photos taken with a camera attached to a microscope, over four weeks. You go, little cell blob.
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Jelly blob
Jellyfish are the blobbiest creatures there are. There are around 2,000 species of jellyfish throughout the world, and all of them are blobby. But this one, in particular, is especially blobby. In July, some divers in England came across this gigantic barrel jellyfish, and were lucky enough to catch the rare encounter on camera.
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Squid blob
Another underwater blob that researchers came across this year was this human-sized gelatinous sac encasing a large yellow blobby object that was found near a sunken ship in Norway. Upon inspection with a torch, the divers discovered that the blob was actually a clump of squid ink with hundreds of thousands of tiny squid eggs inside it.
The team later confirmed that the sac belongs to the southern shortfin squid, which is a ten armed cephalopod. They lay around 200,000 eggs at a time in gel like sacs which Norweigans have a word for: "blekksprutgeleball," which means "squid gel ball".
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Penis fish blobs
The bizarrest blob of the year award definitely goes to these disturbing things: penis fish, or fat innkeeper worms. One day when an unsuspecting man went for a walk on his local beach in California, he discovered that the beach was covered in writhing, horrifying fish that look uncannily like penises. These disgusting creatures are actually eaten in South Korea, but seeing this photo is as close as we want to get to them *shudder*.
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Mantle blob
Blobs also exist inside the Earth. There are two continent sized blobs piercing the place where the lower mantle reaches the molten outer core, both of which are 100 times taller than Mt Everest. The blobs are made out of hot, compressed rock and they're called "large low-shear-velocity provinces" (LLSVPs) because seismic waves slow down when passing through them. One blob is underneath the Pacific Ocean, and the other is under Africa and parts of the Atlantic Ocean. Although they're so big, scientists don't really know what the blobs are or why they're there. Mystery blobs.
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Moon blob
The Moon also has a mysterious blob. In April, NASA found an "anomaly" of heavy metal inside the Moon's South Pole-Aitken basin, the largest preserved impact crater found in the solar system. The metal blob is hundreds of miles below the surface, weighs 2.4 quadrillion U.S. tons, and is five times the size of Hawaii's Big Island. The blob could be so heavy that it's altering the Moon's gravitational field.
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Sun blob
Even the Sun has blobs. Every few hours, the plasma underlying solar wind grows hotter and denser, and occasionally pops out of the sun in a lava-lamp like blob. These blobs are big enough to engulf planets, and while scientists think they might be related to solar storms, their exact cause and function remains unknown.
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Neutron star blob
In 1987, a star in a neighboring galaxy erupted in a supernova explosion, leaving behind a cloud of debris. Behind this colorful debris should have been a neutron star - the collapsed corpse of a star - but astronomers were never able to find it. However, a study came out in November suggesting that researchers have found the missing neutron star inside a blob of super bright radiation at the cloud's core. Stellar blob to the rescue.
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Galaxy blob
The Fermi Bubbles are twin blobs of gas that balloon out of both poles of the Milky Way's center. They're both about 25,000 light years long and are a few million years old. The twin blobs are thought to have something to do with a giant explosion in a black hole in the center of our galaxy, but the only way to view them is with super powerful gamma-ray and X-ray telescopes. In September, astronomers discovered radio waves inside the blobs, suggesting that large quantities of high-energy gas may be moving through the blobs and helping them to grow. Energy blobs.
The Best Blobs Of The Year
'Blob' isn't just a funny word to say; it's actually a scientific term for a roundish, lumpy item that can't really be described in any other way. There are many blobs in this universe, but here are the best nine blobs that appeared in 2019. Want more science stories? Check out this artificial skin scientists made so robots can feel touch. Weird.
This article originally appeared on Live Science.
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