A person should be allowed to dream sometimes, how freaking cool would this be. A block hole right in our neighbourhood, even closer than Alpha Centauri. Just imagine what kind of things can be learned from studying it.
Seconded.
What if Planet 9 is a Primordial Black Hole?
21–30 of 127 posts
Re: What if Planet 9 is a Primordial Black Hole?
#22shouldn't this be something we can look for without resorting to additions to the standard model?
Re: What if Planet 9 is a Primordial Black Hole?
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cool, and absolutely terrifying.
This is not scary. Yes the event horizon will expand the more matter falls into its gravity well, but otherwise a black hole acts like a normal planet orbiting the Sun.
Is there a theoretical limit on the minimum mass of a black hole?
It's counter-intuitive to me that something could get dense enough to form a black hole and not have more mass than the Sun, or at least enough mass to steal Pluto.
Re: What if Planet 9 is a Primordial Black Hole?
#24One should not miss Figure 1 of the arXiv preprint, which is, alas, absent from the final PRL. https://arxiv.org/pdf/1909.11090.pdf It is among the rarest journal-article figures in physics. If I'd been asked to referee the paper, I'd have campaigned hard to keep it in.
thank you for this, i laughed out loud
Re: What if Planet 9 is a Primordial Black Hole?
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is not scary. Yes the event horizon will expand the more matter falls into its gravity well, but otherwise a black hole acts like a normal planet orbiting the Sun.
Is there a theoretical limit on the minimum mass of a black hole? It's counter-intuitive to me that something could get dense enough to form a black hole and not have more mass than the Sun, or at least enough mass to steal Pluto.
Yeah, the event horizon the size of a Planck unit.
Again, unless you get super close, it acts identical to a regular planet of the same mass.
Re: What if Planet 9 is a Primordial Black Hole?
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is not scary. Yes the event horizon will expand the more matter falls into its gravity well, but otherwise a black hole acts like a normal planet orbiting the Sun.
Is there a theoretical limit on the minimum mass of a black hole? It's counter-intuitive to me that something could get dense enough to form a black hole and not have more mass than the Sun, or at least enough mass to steal Pluto.
I don't think so. With the various colliders there was talk of black holes but they would be small and super short lived. The question may be more interesting if we talk about stable black holes at least by human time scales.
Re: What if Planet 9 is a Primordial Black Hole?
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is not scary. Yes the event horizon will expand the more matter falls into its gravity well, but otherwise a black hole acts like a normal planet orbiting the Sun.
Is there a theoretical limit on the minimum mass of a black hole? It's counter-intuitive to me that something could get dense enough to form a black hole and not have more mass than the Sun, or at least enough mass to steal Pluto.
Small black holes evaporate fairly quickly from Hawking radiation. The rate increases dramatically the smaller the mass. Since the only time primordial black holes would have formed was in the Big Bang there is a lower limit based on the black hole surviving 13.8 billion years. iirc the number is on the order of 10^12 kilograms.
Re: What if Planet 9 is a Primordial Black Hole?
#28Re: What if Planet 9 is a Primordial Black Hole?
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Cool, and absolutely terrifying.
No more terrifying than any gravity well.
Yes the cool thing about black holes is that the terrible things inside them can never get out. It's like a prison-planet with the most terrible criminals in there, but they can never escape. Laws of Physics prohibit that
Re: What if Planet 9 is a Primordial Black Hole?
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is not scary. Yes the event horizon will expand the more matter falls into its gravity well, but otherwise a black hole acts like a normal planet orbiting the Sun.
Is there a theoretical limit on the minimum mass of a black hole? It's counter-intuitive to me that something could get dense enough to form a black hole and not have more mass than the Sun, or at least enough mass to steal Pluto.
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