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-------------------------- 2448 - PLANET NINE - could it be a blackhole?
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- All kids know there are nine planets in our Solar System. Well, older kids. The younger kids today know there are “eight” planets and several “Dwarf Planets”, Pluto being one of those. So, what is this talk about “Planet Nine“?
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- It all has to do with Kepler’s Laws , equations” for orbiting bodies. The eight planets orbit according to the math, except when you get to the outer planets where the math suggests another orbiting mass outside the orbit of Pluto. But, we can not find it.
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- One theory is that it is a blackhole. Maybe there is an ancient, grapefruit-size blackhole hiding out in our solar system. This tiny, heavy object might in fact take the place of a theoretical planet that might be tugging on other objects in our solar system. This so-called Planet 9 could explain the math calculations and why we cannot find it.
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- Here is how the math argument goes: Far away in the outer reaches of the solar system, past where the planet Neptune orbits, there are a handful of small objects that behave strangely. These "trans-Nuptunian objects" cluster together in unusual ways, and they tend to spin around axises that point toward one broad swath of the sky, away from the larger known planets.
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- Also the objects orbit in a different plane than the eight known planets. That suggests that something else is tugging on them with its gravity.
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- Astronomers have looked at that strange pattern, run some calculations, and concluded that there must be another planet out there, one that’s 10 to 20 times the mass of Earth and following an orbit that carries it many hundreds of times Earth's distance from the Sun.
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- This theory is called "Planet 9" . The hunt for Planet 9 has gone on for years, with astronomers using visual light and infrared telescopes to scan the outermost parts of the solar system.
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- It doesn't need to be a planet. The most mundane, or maybe the most sane explanation is that it's a planet. But it could theoretically be a primordial black hole.
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- Blackholes are usually thought to be enormous objects formed when giant stars collapse into themselves, trapping their masses in infinitely dense singularities, surrounded by giant "event horizons" from which no light can escape.
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- But, this theory contends that in the first moments of the universe, when everything was hot and dense and rushing away from the Big Bang, and no stars had formed yet, blackholes were already emerging.
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- These primordial blackholes formed during the universe's creation would have formed when chunks of that early matter were crushed together so tightly that they condensed into singularities. Therefore these blackholes would be smaller than stellar blackholes that formed from collapsing massive stars.
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- A blackhole of that mass would be tiny , about the size of a grapefruit yet five times the mass of Earth, and the size of a bowling ball would be 10 times Earth's mass. The blackhole would orbit the Sun like a planet would, and it would tug on dwarf planets and asteroids just like the theoretical Planet 9 would. There would not be any way to tell the effects of a planet's gravity from that of a primordial blackhole of the same mass.
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- There's an experiment called the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE) in Poland. It scans the sky for evidence of gravitational "microlensing," places in space where a planet or some other object's gravity has bent the path of a ray of light, causing it to hit Earth. In the cases of the stars studied by OGLE, this light-bending just looks like the star momentarily brightening.
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- OGLE has reported something strange. Six times, it has spotted very brief microlensing events, less than 0.3 days long, suggestive of very fast-moving objects between 0.5 Earth masses and 20 Earth masses zipping past stars. This isn't how planets look to OGLE and there is good reason to suspect that the six objects might be primordial blackholes.
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- If those six objects were small, ancient blackholes then that means such blackholes are not so rare in the universe. The Planet 9-blackhole theory then explains two mysteries: the trans-Neptunian object anomaly and the OGLE anomaly.
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- This missing planet is somewhere between five and 20 Earth masses, and the OGLE evidence points somewhere between 0.5 and 20 Earth masses.
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- If the Planet nine anomaly does actually turn out to be a blackhole, it would prove the existence of primordial blackholes, and nail down a mass range for them that would explain when exactly in the history of the universe they formed.
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- The trans-Neptunian object orbital anomaly seems to be real ,but, this idea of the planet hiding out there beyond the object doesn't explain it that well.
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- Some astronomers still think there's a planet out there. We need more data!
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- Other Reviews available upon request about the planets:
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- 965 - The chemistry of planet formation.
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- 935 -- Planet temperatures.
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- 928 - Planet formation.
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- 919 - Planet travel.
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- 840 - Planet Pegasi and Dopper astronomy.
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- 839 - Our gaseous planets
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- 710 - Fourier discovers he terrestrial planets.
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- 691 - Other planets in other solar systems.
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- 591 - Osiris , a planet around another star.
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- 41 - The five visible planets.
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- 29 - Our gaseous planets.
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- October 3, 2019 2448
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--------------------- Thursday, October 3, 2019 --------------------
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