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Evidence of controversial Planet 9 uncovered in sky surveys taken 23 years apart

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Re: Evidence of controversial Planet 9 uncovered in sky surveys taken 23 years apart

#101

Post by misnome »

ednite wrote: post #82
ednite wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, if there is a golf ball–sized black hole out there chilling in the outer solar system, I'm all in. Let’s fire up a replica of TARS, load up ChatGPT inside (TARS-GPT, patent pending), and yeet it straight toward the Schwarzschild golf ball. It’ll narrate live. Imagine the livestream: “Approaching event horizon. Spaghettification at 3%. Mood: stretchy.” “Entering gravitational lensing zone… wow, even my token…

Not sure why the downvotes—if I came off wrong, my apologies. I genuinely meant it in a humoristic way. I'd honestly love to see a probe launched into a black hole.

It’s the AI Poe’s law: Any joke is indistinguishable from insane stuff LLM advocates will earnestly say they can do.

Re: Evidence of controversial Planet 9 uncovered in sky surveys taken 23 years apart

#102

Post by jiggawatts »

jsbisviewtiful wrote: post #47
K0balt wrote: post #24

I hope this turns out to be wrong. I’m still holding out for a primordial back hole Planet X. That would be soooo cool and unbelievably useful.

Why useful? Considering how hard of a time astronomers are having to simply find it it’s hard to imagine it being easy to study.

A black hole reachable in a human lifetime with ordinary chemical rockets would be an amazing laboratory for extreme physics.

Re: Evidence of controversial Planet 9 uncovered in sky surveys taken 23 years apart

#103

Post by margalabargala »

magicalist wrote: post #79
margalabargala wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Black holes are no more "dangerous" than other objects of equal mass. If a black hole with a mass of, say, Ceres hit the Earth, it would not be particularly worse than if Ceres hit the Earth.

> If a black hole with a mass of, say, Ceres hit the Earth, it would not be particularly worse than if Ceres hit the Earth. This equivalency is true for many aspects of orbital mechanics (depending on setup giving sufficient distance), but I don't believe that's true at all for a collision. Someone with more knowledge correct me, but a black hole with the mass of Ceres would be very tiny but also emitting a ton of ra…

I more mean that the resulting moon-sized fragments of what used to be the earth would be equally devoid of life. I agree the physics might vary somewhat.

If the black hole had a mass more similar to a 0.5-mile asteroid...well, I'm not sure what would happen. Would it just punch a hole straight through the earth?

Re: Evidence of controversial Planet 9 uncovered in sky surveys taken 23 years apart

#104

Post by bsdetector »

AIPedant wrote: post #11

I think “15 times further from the Sun than Pluto” is more meaningful for most readers than “700 times further from the Sun than Earth.” If it exists, it’s way way way out there.

Would this be far enough out to use the sun's gravitational lensing to image distant planets?

It seems like the idea was to send a bunch of instruments way out and then take pictures in the brief time they were at a useful distance, but if there's a planet out there we can orbit and so stop the instruments at that distance it seems like we could make a permanent super telescope.

Re: Evidence of controversial Planet 9 uncovered in sky surveys taken 23 years apart

#105

Post by baxtr »

api wrote: post #41
nonethewiser wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is very interesting and made me realize I did think of black holes as “sucking” things in. Which I see is not the right way to think about it.

It’s an object with theoretical maximum density. That’s one way to think about it. Another visualization: if you had an Earth mass black hole with a solid shell surrounding it at the same radius as the Earth’s surface is from its core, gravity atop that shell would be 1g. The actual black hole would be about the size of a marble. If you got close to it you would of course be subject to insane gravity and be “spaghett…

I love HN for these kind of comments

Re: Evidence of controversial Planet 9 uncovered in sky surveys taken 23 years apart

#106

Post by andrewflnr »

jsbisviewtiful wrote: post #47
K0balt wrote: post #24

I hope this turns out to be wrong. I’m still holding out for a primordial back hole Planet X. That would be soooo cool and unbelievably useful.

Why useful? Considering how hard of a time astronomers are having to simply find it it’s hard to imagine it being easy to study.

Yeah, finding it is hard, but once you've found it, sending a probe would be totally doable. I think it would be worth it.

Re: Evidence of controversial Planet 9 uncovered in sky surveys taken 23 years apart

#107

Post by LeifCarrotson »

AIPedant wrote: post #98
NikkiA wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I dunno, '700 AU' gelled for me instantly, '15 times the distance to pluto' doesn't even make sense given pluto's orbit isn't anywhere near circular.

It makes even less sense for Earth because Earth's orbit is near-circular, whereas Planet 9's hypothesized orbit is highly eccentric, more so than Pluto. Most people don't know off-hand that Pluto is ~40-50AU from the sun, so 700AU is hard to conceptualize.

And Neptune orbits at 30 AU with very low eccentricity, "of course."

https://xkcd.com/2501/

Re: Evidence of controversial Planet 9 uncovered in sky surveys taken 23 years apart

#108

Post by fallingknife »

bsdetector wrote: post #104
AIPedant wrote: post #11

I think “15 times further from the Sun than Pluto” is more meaningful for most readers than “700 times further from the Sun than Earth.” If it exists, it’s way way way out there.

Would this be far enough out to use the sun's gravitational lensing to image distant planets? It seems like the idea was to send a bunch of instruments way out and then take pictures in the brief time they were at a useful distance, but if there's a planet out there we can orbit and so stop the instruments at that distance it seems like we could make a permanent super telescope.

Probably easier to just put it in solar orbit at that distance. Orbital velocity is only about 1km/s at 700 AU.

Re: Evidence of controversial Planet 9 uncovered in sky surveys taken 23 years apart

#109

Post by john2x »

ta1243 wrote: post #57
kiba wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We could use the black hole to power our civilization due to how efficient it is for generating power.

No need for something that exotic. The Earth alone receives more energy from the sun every hour than mankind uses each year.

Yeah but you can't raise trillions of dollars with that. Investors want to be able to tell to their friends at parties that they helped made blackhole tech possible.

Re: Evidence of controversial Planet 9 uncovered in sky surveys taken 23 years apart

#110

Post by codesnik »

bsdetector wrote: post #104
AIPedant wrote: post #11

I think “15 times further from the Sun than Pluto” is more meaningful for most readers than “700 times further from the Sun than Earth.” If it exists, it’s way way way out there.

Would this be far enough out to use the sun's gravitational lensing to image distant planets? It seems like the idea was to send a bunch of instruments way out and then take pictures in the brief time they were at a useful distance, but if there's a planet out there we can orbit and so stop the instruments at that distance it seems like we could make a permanent super telescope.

orbiting a planet in that case is no different than orbiting a sun on the same orbit as planet. Probably even more cumbersome, all that jiggling around. Or are you talking about making a gravity assist to turn the orbit of the probe into less eccentric?
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