Image of the day

Captured by
Terry Wood

Jupiter (clearer) Nov 5th 2023 w/Mewlon 180c

My Account

New to Astromart?

Register an account...

Need Help?

Is Planet Nine a Primordial Black Hole?

Posted by Guy Pirro   08/14/2020 12:31AM

Is Planet Nine a Primordial Black Hole?

Scientists at Harvard University and the Black Hole Initiative (BHI) have developed a new method to find black holes in the outer Solar System, and along with it, determine once-and-for-all the true nature of the hypothesized Planet Nine. (Image Credit: Movie poster from the film “Plan 9 From Outer Space” released in 1959 by Distributors Corporation of America).

What does this poster have to do with the story? Absolutely nothing. But if you get a chance to see this film (link below), do so. Then you can proudly tell your friends that you watched what some movie critics claim is “the worst film in the history of cinema.” This movie is so bad on so many levels (and so cheaply made) that it is actually entertaining. I dread to think how bad Plans One through Eight must have been.

 


Is Planet Nine a Primordial Black Hole?

Scientists at Harvard University and the Black Hole Initiative (BHI) have developed a new method to find black holes in the outer solar system, and along with it, determine once-and-for-all the true nature of the hypothesized Planet Nine. The paper, accepted to The Astrophysical Journal Letters, highlights the ability of the future Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) mission to observe accretion flares, the presence of which could prove or rule out Planet Nine as a black hole.

Dr. Avi Loeb, Frank B. Baird Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard, and Amir Siraj, a Harvard undergraduate student, have developed the new method to search for black holes in the outer solar system, based on flares that result from the disruption of intercepted comets. The study suggests that the LSST has the capability to find black holes by observing for accretion flares resulting from the impact of small Oort cloud objects.

"In the vicinity of a black hole, small bodies that approach it will melt as a result of heating from the background accretion of gas from the interstellar medium onto the black hole," said Siraj. "Once they melt, the small bodies are subject to tidal disruption by the black hole, followed by accretion from the tidally disrupted body onto the black hole." Loeb added, "Because black holes are intrinsically dark, the radiation that matter emits on its way to the mouth of the black hole is our only way to illuminate this dark environment."

Future searches for primordial black holes could be informed by the new calculation. "This method can detect or rule out trapped planet-mass black holes out to the edge of the Oort cloud, or about a hundred thousand astronomical units," said Siraj. "It could be capable of placing new limits on the fraction of dark matter contained in primordial black holes."

The upcoming LSST is expected to have the sensitivity required to detect accretion flares, while current technology isn’t able to do so without guidance. "LSST has a wide field of view, covering the entire sky again and again, and searching for transient flares," said Loeb. "Other telescopes are good at pointing at a known target but we do not know exactly where to look for Planet Nine. We only know the broad region in which it may reside." Siraj added, “LSST's ability to survey the sky twice per week is extremely valuable. In addition, its unprecedented depth will allow for the detection of flares resulting from relatively small impactors, which are more frequent than large ones."

The new paper focuses on the famed Planet Nine as a prime first candidate for detection. The subject of much speculation, most theories suggest that Planet Nine is a previously undetected planet, but it may also flag the existence of a planet-mass black hole.

"Planet Nine is a compelling explanation for the observed clustering of some objects beyond the orbit of Neptune. If the existence of Planet Nine is confirmed through a direct electromagnetic search, it will be the first detection of a new planet in the solar system in two centuries, not counting Pluto, said Siraj, adding that a failure to detect light from Planet Nine—or other recent models, such as the suggestion to send probes to measure gravitational influence—would make the black hole model intriguing. "There has been a great deal of speculation concerning alternative explanations for the anomalous orbits observed in the outer solar system. One of the ideas put forth was the possibility that Planet Nine could be a grapefruit-sized black hole with a mass of five to ten times that of the Earth."

The focus on Planet Nine is based both in the unprecedented scientific significance that a hypothetical discovery of a planet-mass black hole in the solar system would hold as well as the continued interest in understanding what’s out there. "The outskirts of the solar system is our backyard. Finding Planet Nine is like discovering a cousin living in the shed behind your home which you never knew about," said Loeb. "It immediately raises questions: why is it there? How did it obtain its properties? Did it shape the solar system history? Are there more like it?"

The research was funded in part by a grant from the Breakthrough Prize Foundation, and by Harvard’s Black Hole Initiative (BHI), which is funded by grants from the John Templeton Foundation (JTF) and the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation (GBMF).

 

 

 

 

Evidence of Planet Nine Detected in 2016

In 2016, researchers at the California Institute of Technology (CalTech) found evidence of a giant planet tracing a bizarre, highly elongated orbit in the outer solar system. The object, which the researchers nicknamed "Planet Nine," has a mass about 10 times that of Earth and orbits about 20 times farther from the Sun on average than does Neptune (which orbits the sun at an average distance of 2.8 billion miles). In fact, it would take this new planet between 10,000 and 20,000 years to make just one full orbit around the sun.

The researchers, Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown, discovered the planet's existence through mathematical modeling and computer simulations but have not yet observed the object directly.

"This would be a real ninth planet," says Brown, Professor of Planetary Astronomy at CalTech. "There have only been two true planets discovered since ancient times, and this would be a third. It's a pretty substantial chunk of our solar system that's still out there to be found, which is pretty exciting."

Brown notes that the putative ninth planet -- at 5,000 times the mass of Pluto -- is sufficiently large that there should be no debate about whether it is a true planet. Unlike the class of smaller objects now known as dwarf planets, Planet Nine gravitationally dominates its neighborhood of the solar system. In fact, it dominates a region larger than any of the other known planets -- a fact that Brown says makes it "the most planet-y of the planets in the whole solar system."

Batygin and Brown believe that Planet Nine helps explain a number of mysterious features in the field of icy objects and debris beyond Neptune known as the Kuiper Belt.

"Although we were initially quite skeptical that this planet could exist, as we continued to investigate its orbit and what it would mean for the outer solar system, we become increasingly convinced that it is out there," says Batygin, an assistant professor of planetary science. "For the first time in over 150 years, there is solid evidence that the solar system's planetary census is incomplete."

The road to the theoretical discovery was not straightforward. In 2014, a former postdoc of Brown's, Chad Trujillo, and his colleague Scott Sheppard published a paper noting that 13 of the most distant objects in the Kuiper Belt are similar with respect to an obscure orbital feature. To explain that similarity, they suggested the possible presence of a small planet. Brown thought the planet solution was unlikely, but his interest was piqued.

He took the problem down the hall to Batygin, and the two started what became a year-and-a-half-long collaboration to investigate the distant objects. As an observer and a theorist, respectively, the researchers approached the work from very different perspectives -- Brown as someone who looks at the sky and tries to anchor everything in the context of what can be seen, and Batygin as someone who puts himself within the context of dynamics, considering how things might work from a physics standpoint. Those differences allowed the researchers to challenge each other's ideas and to consider new possibilities. "I would bring in some of these observational aspects. He would come back with arguments from theory and we would push each other. I don't think the discovery would have happened without that back and forth," says Brown. "It was perhaps the most fun year of working on a problem in the solar system that I've ever had."

Fairly quickly Batygin and Brown realized that the six most distant objects from Trujillo and Sheppard's original collection all follow elliptical orbits that point in the same direction in physical space. That is particularly surprising because the outermost points of their orbits move around the solar system, and they travel at different rates.

"It's almost like having six hands on a clock all moving at different rates, and when you happen to look up, they're all in exactly the same place," says Brown. The odds of having that happen are something like 1 in 100, he says. But on top of that, the orbits of the six objects are also all tilted in the same way, pointing about 30 degrees downward in the same direction relative to the plane of the eight known planets. The probability of that happening is about 0.007 percent. "Basically it shouldn't happen randomly," Brown says. "So we thought something else must be shaping these orbits."

The first possibility they investigated was that perhaps there are enough distant Kuiper Belt objects, some of which have not yet been discovered, to exert the gravity needed to keep that sub-population clustered together. The researchers quickly ruled this out when it turned out that such a scenario would require the Kuiper Belt to have about 100 times the mass it has today.

That left them with the idea of a planet. Their first instinct was to run simulations involving a planet in a distant orbit that encircled the orbits of the six Kuiper Belt objects, acting like a giant lasso to wrangle them into their alignment. Batygin says that almost works but does not provide the observed eccentricities precisely. "Close, but no cigar," he says.

Then, effectively by accident, Batygin and Brown noticed that if they ran their simulations with a massive planet in an anti-aligned orbit, an orbit in which the planet's closest approach to the sun, or perihelion, is 180 degrees across from the perihelion of all the other objects and known planets, the distant Kuiper Belt objects in the simulation assumed the alignment that is actually observed.

"Your natural response is: This orbital geometry can't be right. This can't be stable over the long term because, after all, this would cause the planet and these objects to meet and eventually collide," says Batygin. But through a mechanism known as mean-motion resonance, the anti-aligned orbit of the ninth planet actually prevents the Kuiper Belt objects from colliding with it and keeps them aligned. As orbiting objects approach each other they exchange energy. So, for example, for every four orbits Planet Nine makes, a distant Kuiper Belt object might complete nine orbits. They never collide. Instead, like a parent maintaining the arc of a child on a swing with periodic pushes, Planet Nine nudges the orbits of distant Kuiper Belt objects such that their configuration with relation to the planet is preserved.

"Still, I was very skeptical," says Batygin. "I had never seen anything like this in celestial mechanics."

But little by little, as the researchers investigated additional features and consequences of the model, they became persuaded. "A good theory should not only explain things that you set out to explain. It should hopefully explain things that you didn't set out to explain and make predictions that are testable," says Batygin.

And indeed Planet Nine's existence helps explain more than just the alignment of the distant Kuiper Belt objects. It also provides an explanation for the mysterious orbits that two of them trace. The first of those objects, dubbed Sedna, was discovered by Brown in 2003. Unlike standard-variety Kuiper Belt objects, which get gravitationally "kicked out" by Neptune and then return back to it, Sedna never gets very close to Neptune. A second object like Sedna, known as 2012 VP113, was announced by Trujillo and Sheppard in 2014. Batygin and Brown found that the presence of Planet Nine in its proposed orbit naturally produces Sedna-like objects by taking a standard Kuiper Belt object and slowly pulling it away into an orbit less connected to Neptune.

But the real kicker for the researchers was the fact that their simulations also predicted that there would be objects in the Kuiper Belt on orbits inclined perpendicularly to the plane of the planets. Batygin kept finding evidence for these in his simulations and took them to Brown. "Suddenly I realized there are objects like that," recalls Brown. In the last three years, observers have identified four objects tracing orbits roughly along one perpendicular line from Neptune and one object along another. "We plotted up the positions of those objects and their orbits, and they matched the simulations exactly," says Brown. "When we found that, my jaw sort of hit the floor."

"When the simulation aligned the distant Kuiper Belt objects and created objects like Sedna, we thought this is kind of awesome. You kill two birds with one stone," says Batygin. "But with the existence of the planet also explaining these perpendicular orbits, not only do you kill two birds, you also take down a bird that you didn't realize was sitting in a nearby tree."

Where did Planet Nine come from and how did it end up in the outer solar system? Scientists have long believed that the early solar system began with four planetary cores that went on to grab all of the gas around them, forming the four gas planets—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Over time, collisions and ejections shaped them and moved them out to their present locations. "But there is no reason that there could not have been five cores, rather than four," says Brown. Planet Nine could represent that fifth core, and if it got too close to Jupiter or Saturn, it could have been ejected into its distant, eccentric orbit.

 

Plan Nine From Outer Space (1959) Full Movie:

 

 

 

 

Batygin and Brown continue to refine their simulations and learn more about the planet's orbit and its influence on the distant solar system. Meanwhile, Brown and other colleagues have begun searching the skies for Planet Nine. Only the planet's rough orbit is known, not the precise location of the planet on that elliptical path. If the planet happens to be close to its perihelion, Brown says, astronomers should be able to spot it in images captured by previous surveys. If it is in the most distant part of its orbit, the world's largest telescopes, such as the twin 10-meter telescopes at the W. M. Keck Observatory and the Subaru Telescope on Mauna Kea in Hawaii, will be needed to see it. If, however, Planet Nine is now located anywhere in between, many telescopes have a shot at finding it.

"I would love to find it," says Brown. "But I'd also be perfectly happy if someone else found it. That is why we're publishing this paper. We hope that other people are going to get inspired and start searching."

In terms of understanding more about the solar system's context in the rest of the universe, Batygin says that in a couple of ways, this ninth planet that seems like such an oddball to us would actually make our solar system more similar to the other planetary systems that astronomers are finding around other stars. First, most of the planets around other sunlike stars have no single orbital range. That is, some orbit extremely close to their host stars while others follow exceptionally distant orbits. Second, the most common planets around other stars range between 1 and 10 Earth-masses.

Headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian (CfA) is a collaboration between the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Harvard College Observatory. CfA scientists, organized into six research divisions, study the origin, evolution and ultimate fate of the universe.

 

 

For more information:

https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/news/2020-13

https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/caltech-researchers-find-evidence-real-ninth-planet-49523

https://astromart.com/news/show/does-jupiter-have-a-bigger-brother-hiding-in-the-oort-cloud

https://astromart.com/news/show/yes-virginia-pluto-really-is-a-planet

 

Astromart News Archives:

https://www.astromart.com/news/search?category_id=3&q=.

 

Do you enjoy reading these postings?

Then click here and buy the Astromart staff a cup of coffee (and maybe even some donuts):

https://www.astromart.com/support-options

 

Free counters!