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The phantom planet 9 could be a black hole

2020-07-15T08:33:26.327Z


The hunt for the phantom planet 9 continues, among the most recent hypotheses is that it could be a primordial black hole and now two astronomers propose a technique to locate it by mapping the sky in search of the glow emitted by comets while being devoured (ANSA)


 The hunt for the phantom Planet 9 continues. Chased for decades, it has inspired fantasies, research and calculations of celestial mechanics and lately the hypothesis has come to light that it could be a primordial black hole, at the point two astronomers propose a technique to identify it by mapping the sky in search of the glow emitted by comets as they are devoured. Published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, the technique is by Amir Siraj and Abraham Loeb, of the American university of Harvard.

The two astronomers developed a method to search for black holes in the outermost region of the Solar System and to determine, once and for all, the true nature of the hypothetical Planet 9, the existence of which has been speculated to explain the unusual aligned orbits of six small celestial bodies on the edge of the solar system.

There are various hypotheses on the identity of the mysterious planet, there are those who believe that it is the size of Neptune, those who think it also has other mysterious companions. Among the most recent, there is the hypothesis advanced in 2019 by physicists of the British university of Durham and the American university of Illinois in Chicago that it is not a planet at all but a black hole.

One of the advanced ideas, observes Siraj explains, "was that Planet 9 could be a black hole the size of a grapefruit, with a mass five to ten times that of Earth". The most mysterious of the planets would be a primordial black hole, which was not born from the collapse of a star, but from the matter that thickened during the initial expansion of the universe.

According to the two astronomers, this object could be identified thanks to the Lsst mission (Legacy Survey of Space and Time) which should become operational in 2023. The project is based on a telescope under construction in Northern Chile, capable of photographing the entire vault sky of the southern hemisphere.

According to the research, thanks to this ability, Lsst could identify any black holes on the periphery of the Solar System by photographing the glow emitted by comets just before being swallowed. According to Loeb: "since black holes are intrinsically dark, the radiation that matter emits on its way to the black hole is our only way to illuminate this dark environment."

Source: ansa

All tech articles on 2020-07-15

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