You may have heard of Planet Nine---- a hypothetical planet thought to exist in the outer periphery of the solar system. One possibility is that Planet Nine is not a planet, but a small black hole. The new study, which could begin as early as next year, outlines a potential strategy for detecting the so-called black hole.
Harvard astronomers Ive Laueber and Emile Siraj proposed a new strategy for detecting a grapefruit-sized black hole on the outer reaches of the solar system. The paper has been accepted and published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. Astronomers can use the Vera Lopez, which is still being built in Chile. The C. Rubin Observatory, which indirectly detects the object by observing what it does best for black holes: devouring things.
The reason why it is thought that black holes may be lurking there is related to a set of unexplained astronomical observations. We don't know what something seems to be affecting a set of objects outside neptune's orbit. One possible explanation is that an undiscovered planet, known as Planet Nine, has a mass between 5 and 10 Earth masses and is in an extended orbit 400 to 800 AU from the Sun, with 1 AU being the average distance from Earth to the Sun. Recently, scientists have come up with another explanation: primordial black holes with similar masses.
There may be an ancient black hole in our solar system, which may not sound so strange. As Loeb explained to Gizmodo, scientists believe that dark matter in the universe may have been caused by primordial black holes. If that's the case, there should be a large number of black holes out there, and the idea that one of them is trapped in our solar system isn't stupid.
In Loeb's email to Gyzmodo, he wrote: "It's obviously going to be very exciting. Because we've been looking for the nature of dark matter for almost half a century. "If black holes are dark matter, then there should be 50 trillion black holes like this in the Milky Way alone that make up the mass of the entire Milky Way, which is equivalent to a trillion solar masses."
By the way, a quadrillion is 1 followed by 15 zeros.
Finding an object with an event range the size of a grapefruit sounds daunting, but these massive weights can wreak havoc on the local environment. This is exactly what Loeb and Siraj were counting on, because the hypothetical black hole should absorb the occasional Oort cloud object, the comet.
The comet, which was caught by the clutches of the black hole and gradually approached the end of the world, began to melt as it interacted with the hot gas that had accumulated in the region. This process is supposed to produce a radiation signal detected from Earth, which scientists call an accretion flare.
Loeb told Gizmodo: "Our paper suggests that if Planet 9 is a black hole, then the comet that inhabits the outer reaches of the solar system — the so-called Oort cloud — will hit it, it will be destroyed by strong gravitational waves, and in less than a second it will rapidly flare."
If the comet is large enough, it should be detectable by a spatiotemporal heritage survey scheduled to begin next year at the Rubin Observatory. Since the telescope has a very large field of view, it is perfect for this task. Astronomers have only a very crude idea of where they should find Planet Nine, or a black hole, but LSST will cover half the sky and make 824 repeat visits to each location over a 10-year period.
"If Planet Nine is a black hole, we expect to see at least some flares about a year after LSST starts measuring the sky," Loeb said. ”
This is not the first proposal to find a potential black hole. Earlier this year, Edward Witten, a physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study, made a proposal to send hundreds of spacecraft to the outer solar system. Their sensitivity to clock changes would indicate the presence of a strong gravitational field produced by a small black hole. It sounds cool, but Rob and Siraj's new proposal is more practical.
Jacob Scholz, a postdoc at Durham University's Institute of Phenomenology in Particle Physics, told Gyzmodo: "If this is indeed a reasonable strategy, then the idea that Robb and Siraj put forward is really great." "As a primordial black hole scene, this will change the game for Planet Nine."
Skolts and his colleague James Anwen from the University of Illinois in Chicago published a paper last year arguing that Planet Nine is in fact a black hole. The odds of catching a black hole in our solar system are about 50-50, he said, so if the authors can test this, "we should continue to do that." ”
Either way, the LSST project will produce meaningful results, as the lack of evidence of black holes may point to other possibilities, such as: Planet Nine is actually a planet. Incredibly, we still know nothing about our own solar system.
BY: George Dvorsky
FY: Ink Jade
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