Planet 9 May Be A Primordial Baseball-Sized Black Hole – Astronomers Say

Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com – The search for the elusive Planet 9 that is believed to be lurking in the outer solar system continues.

Scientists have many theories about Planet 9, but no-one knows whether the planet exists and if it does, how large is it and where exactly can it be found.

Scientists keep looking for Planet 9. Credit: Tom Ruen, Public Domain

A while back astronomer proposed Planet 9 is ten times larger than Earth and it’s lurking beyond the realms of Pluto. Now, astronomers say Planet 9 may be a tiny black hole, not larger than a baseball.

Could Planet 9 Be A Primordial Black Hole?

Scientists estimate tens of thousands of black holes exist in Milky Way’s center, and astronomers learn every year more about these giant monsters that can be 10 billion times greater than the Sun.

Black holes are extremely large regions of spacetime exhibiting gravitational acceleration so strong that nothing—no particles or even electromagnetic radiation such as light—can escape from it. However, black holes do not always have to be large.

Primordial black holes are predicted to have been created within the first few fractions of a second after the Big Bang. Initially proposed by Stephen Hawking in 1971, they have come back to the fore in recent years as possible candidates for explaining dark matter.

The existence of these intriguing astrophysical bodies has never been confirmed yet.

“Primordial black holes remain hypothetical objects for the moment, but they are envisaged in some models of the primordial universe,” Riccardo Murgia of CERN said.

Astronomers think these tiny black holes could shed new light on other astronomical objects we still cannot find, like Planet 9.

In their study researchers explain that an odd set of gravitational anomalies, recently identified by the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE), may help explain why Planet 9 is actually a black hole.

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“We highlight that the anomalous orbits of Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs) and an excess in microlensing events in the 5-year OGLE dataset can be simultaneously explained by a new population of astrophysical bodies with mass several times that of Earth.

We take these objects to be primordial black holes (PBHs) and point out the orbits of TNOs would be altered if one of these PBHs was captured by the Solar System, inline with the Planet 9 hypothesis. Capture of a free floating planet is a leading explanation for the origin of Planet 9 and we show that the probability of capturing a PBH (Primordial Black Hole) instead is comparable.

The observational constraints on a PBH in the outer Solar System significantly differ from the case of a new ninth planet. This scenario could be confirmed through annihilation signals from the dark matter microhalo around the PBH.”

The fact that OGLE has spotted several lenses that appear to be much smaller and closer, sitting within our own galaxy is intriguing.

These objects are highly compact and about five times the mass of Earth, but no-one knows what they. If they are primordial black holes than the Universe must be filled with them.

“If the OGLE events are due to a population of primordial black holes then it is possible that the orbital anomalies of trans-Neptunian objects are also due to one of these primordial black holes that was captured by the Solar System,” Jakub Scholtz at Durham University in the UK and James Unwin at the University of Illinois at Chicago said.

The existence of primordial black holes also gives an entirely new perspective on Planet 9 that could be much closer than we could possibly imagine.

Theories About Planet 9

Mysterious Planet 9 has been one of the biggest mysteries in astronomy. For years, astronomers have tried evidence of the elusive planet’s existence. Is it located outside our solar system? Did it ever exist, and if so where is it and what happened to it? A group of astronomers in Sweden suggested Planet 9 was stolen by our Sun 4,5 billion years ago.

Other scientists have proposed Planet Nine could have tilted the planets of our solar system during the last 4.5 billion years, and could be our missing Earth.

Scientists from the University of Arkansas Department of Mathematical Sciences have suggested periodic mass extinctions on Earth, as indicated in the global fossil record, could be linked to a suspected ninth planet.

At present Planet 9 continues to raise more questions than answers but perhaps it’s now only a matter of time before the elusive planet will finally be found.

Written by Eddie Gonzales Jr. – MessageToEagle.com Staff