What If Planet 9 Is a Primordial Black Hole?

Some potentially interesting uses for it:<p>- definitive sink to send all of our nuclear waste (it would be the &#x2F;dev&#x2F;null of the Solar System)<p>- gravitational energy generator (limitless, until we have no more mass to throw in)

Interesting hypothesis. Primordial black holes -- if they exist -- have a tendency to be very small, and very small black holes evaporate extremely quickly. The smallest ones couldn&#x27;t have survived to the present day. An Earth-mass black hole is big enough to have survived until now, but I was under the impression PBHs that big were posited to be very rare.

Very interesting. I guess having a stable black hole like that in our solar system would be an incredible opportunity to send a probe and check our current understanding of physics.<p>If anything it&#x27;d be a lot more valuable then just finding another rock in space.

I apologize in advance for the dumb question. How is an earth mass black hole formed? I thought they form from collapsing large stars.

A PBH in our Solar System would quickly become a very popular target for science, allowing us to test both relativity theory and quantum physics at an unprecedented level. And who knows, we might even be able to use it as a slingshot for interstellar travel, or as a gravitational lens - that would be great!<p>Edit: so, how do we locate it exactly?

It blows my mind to think about sub-stellar mass black holes can exist. As I was ignorant of their theoretical possibility, I thought the lower bound limit to a blackholes mass was the Chandrasekhar limit [1] (or even greater as that simply is the boundary between white dwarves and further collapse to either a neutron star or black hole).<p>To learn that the conditions of the early universe could have create sub-stellar mass black holes means there could be tons of small black holes out there lurking in interstellar space.<p>What would happen if one of them got close enough to our Sun to begin accreting gas from the Sun?<p>- Could it eat the entire Sun and cause our solar system to go dark?<p>- As it gained sufficient mass from the Sun, it would switch from orbiting the Sun to them being a binary system. Would that destabilize the orbits of planets?<p>- Or disturb a ton of Oort cloud bodies and potentially cause tons of comets and raise the risk of impact events?<p>- At what point would the Sun&#x27;s fusion stop?<p>- Obviously this depends on the binary dance of the 2 bodies, but rapidly the sun would be pulled apart.<p>- Would there be X-rays and particle jets like a micro-version of a quasar?<p>I really hope someone is modeling this!<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Chandrasekhar_limit" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Chandrasekhar_limit</a>

How can you tell for sure whether something is a black hole or a regular rock of the same mass, when you&#x27;re too far away to resolve the size of the object in a telescope?<p>Do you have to send a probe close and throw something in it?

I am reminded of a tale from Yukinobu Hoshino&#x27;s science fiction anthology-series 2001 NIGHTS, which had a then-tenth planet named Lucifer, with a retrograde orbit and composed of antimatter- a former sun that collapsed not into a black hole, but a gas giant made of antimatter, left over from the Big Bang.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arche-arc.blogspot.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;11&#x2F;mythcomics-lucifer-rising-2001-nights.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;arche-arc.blogspot.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;11&#x2F;mythcomics-lucifer-ri...</a><p>Were such theories about a hypothetical planet beyond Pluto already existent when this series was created, back in the mid-&#x27;80s?

Wouldn&#x27;t we see some radiation from dust falling in these primordial black holes?

There a lot of talk about the idea of an Earth mass Primordial Black Hole punching through Earth and the effects of such an event. However, Planet nine is predicted to be about five Earth masses, not one.<p>I don&#x27;t have a physics degree, but how close would Earth have to get to such an object before the Earth is within that object&#x27;s Roche limit?

Wouldn&#x27;t we expect such a black hole to slingshot dust and other material to some non-negligible percentages of the speed of light? Wouldn&#x27;t some of that eventually hit the earth&#x27;s atmosphere? What would that look like? Tunguska?

The coolest part is the 1:1 scale figure on page 5 of the PDF. I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;ve ever seen a 1:1 figure in an astronomy paper before.

PBH is a greatest component of alchemy, a philosopher&#x27;s stone. If you mix one with a nearby neutron star in good proportions, you can get <i>lots</i> of gold.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;phys.org&#x2F;news&#x2F;2017-08-theory-heavy-elements-primordial-black.amp" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;phys.org&#x2F;news&#x2F;2017-08-theory-heavy-elements-primordi...</a>

My favourite part of this paper is the 1:1 scale image of the posited black hole in the appendix...

That would be a bit scary. Even a little wiggle in the orbit of such a body could spell devastation.