![]() Previous research had already shown that its Hawking radiation would be too weak to be seen from Earth, but new research, published in January in the preprint database arXiv, investigated if a flyby mission would have a better chance of spotting the Hawking radiation from such a black hole.Īlas, even using a fleet of lightweight, fast spacecraft to scour the outer system, we are very unlikely to spot Planet Nine through its Hawking radiation. That's hopelessly undetectable.īut a small, nearby black hole (like, say, Planet Nine) might be more accessible. Due to a complex interaction between gravity and quantum forces at the event horizon, or boundary of a black hole, he proposed, black holes can indeed feebly emit radiation, slowly shrinking in the process.Īnd when I say "feebly," I really mean it: A black hole the mass of the sun would emit a single photon - yes, one electromagnetic particle - every year. In the 1970s, famed physicist Stephen Hawking theorized that black holes aren't exactly 100% black. So, if scientists can confirm that a small black hole is orbiting the sun, it could provide an intriguing look at one of the greatest mysteries of modern cosmology. But cosmological observations have ruled out most models of primordial black hole formation, with a few narrow exceptions - like planet-size black holes. ![]() These primordial black holes could flood the cosmos. Related: The 12 strangest objects in the universeīut black holes smaller than that could have formed in the extreme conditions of the early universe. And because only the most massive stars (no smaller than, say, 10 solar masses) are big enough to form a black hole, they can only leave behind black holes with a minimum mass of around 5 times that of the sun. All black holes we know of in the universe come from the deaths of massive stars. Small black holes (and "small," here means planet-size) are very interesting to astronomers. So now, astronomers have proposed an alternative hypothesis: Maybe Planet Nine isn't a planet at all but rather a small black hole. But even our deepest, most sensitive scans have turned up nothing. If Planet Nine is indeed out there, it may be on a part of its orbit that takes it so far away from the sun that we can't observe it with current technology. Plus, there's the glaring reality that, after almost five years of searching, nobody has found Planet Nine. In other words, these TNOs only appear to be clustering because of our "biased" observations. For instance, researchers reported in February that the evidence for Planet Nine - particularly the clustering of TNOs - could be the result of where astronomers point their telescopes, Live Science reported. The observations of TNOs may be biased, so astronomers may not have monitored a fair sample, meaning the odd clustering may be an artifact of our observation strategy rather than a real effect. The evidence for Planet Nine isn't conclusive, though. ![]() The gravity from such an object could draw these TNOs into clustered orbits, the idea goes. They dubbed this hypothetical world Planet Nine. ![]() The probability of that clustering happening by pure random chance is less than 1%, which led some astronomers to suspect that there might be a massive planet out there - something bigger than Neptune that orbits more than 10 times farther from the sun than Neptune does. A few of these TNOs have oddly clustered orbits that align with one another.
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