Black holes are some of the most powerful and violent objects in the universe. They can warp space and time and rip entire stars to pieces. So, what if I told you that astrophysicists think there's one lurking inour very own solar system? Then a new discovery rocked the astronomicalworld to its foundation. Now, before you freak out, you should know thatour planet isn't about to get sucked up andreappear in another galaxy. If there is a black hole, it's at least 20 times farther from Earth than the furthest planet, Neptune, in a distant region of our solar system called the extended Kuiper Belt.
The belt is home tobillions of icy objects, like comets and asteroids. And in 2016, astronomersKonstantin Batygin and Mike Brown noticed that some of them have highly unusual orbits. While most objects in our solar system orbit the same plane, andin the same direction, the orbit of theseobjects looks like this. Some of them orbit on a slight tilt. Others orbit backwards. And still others orbit perpendicular to the plane of our solar system. Imaginethe plane of the solar system as being your table. These orbits are stacked like books. Narrator: They concludedthat this could mean only one thing. In order togenerate this population of highly inclined, perpendicular orbits, you need some distant gravitational pull.
By their calculation,that gravitational pull is five times greater than Earth's. So they reasoned that this "something" was as large as a planet orbiting our sun. In fact, they even wentso far to give it a name, Planet 9. Now, of course, if they wereto confirm this discovery, it would be groundbreaking. The first new planet in our solar system since the discovery of Neptune in 1846. Very littleis known about Neptune, the last of the giants on this tour. But there was a problem. No one was able to observethe planet directly. Now, that could be becausefinding a planet that far away is like searching for aneedle in a haystack... with the lights off and only a vague idea ofwhere the haystack even is. Or it could be because, well, that "something" is not a planet at all. In a study published in the fall of 2019, theoretical physicists JakubScholtz and James Unwin proposed it couldactually be a black hole. Not just any black hole,but a primordial black hole.
Primordialblack hole is a remnant from the Big Bang that camefrom a very dense region that almost instantly collapsedinto a small black hole right during the birth of the universe. And they do mean small. About the size of a tennis ball. That's right; this black hole would fit in the palm of your hands. While the idea might sound far-fetched, it isn't totally out there. For over 50 years, astronomershave proposed the universe is littered with primordial black holes. And we've even observedfluctuations of starlight in our own galaxy, which primordial blackholes could explain. Not only that, but Scholtzand Unwin also noticed that if a primordial blackhole orbited the sun, it would have the same effecton objects in the Kuiper Belt as a large planet. But whether it's a black hole or a planet, there's another mystery. Where did it come from? One idea is that the object waswandering through the galaxy and got caught in the sun's gravity, but for now, this is all just speculation.
If we do do oursearches and it turns out that there is a planet inthe outer solar system, this would be an absolutelyincredible discovery. Such a strange planeton such an odd orbit. It would really change our understanding of the history of the solar system. But if it is proventhat this is a black hole in our own outer solar system? This is completely mind-blowing. And the fact that thisnot only would change our understanding of solar system physics, but it also gives us a newwindow into astrophysics, into early-universe cosmology, and into, potentiallyinto, the fundamentals of particle physics.
Whether it'sa planet, a black hole, or something else entirely, one thing is for sure: When we do find the source of this mysterious gravitationalpull, it will be huge.
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