Posted on May 4, 2020 in Science
A bowling-ball sized primordial black hole, a relic of the Big Bang, may exist in our Solar system that could be detected according to theoretical physicist Edward Witten, at the Institute for Advanced Study, who has been compared to Issac Newton and Einstein.
In a paper posted September, 2019 to arXiv, physicists James Unwin, University of Illinois at Chicago and Jakub Scholtz at the University of Durham in the United Kingdom, showed that the likelihood of our Sun capturing a free planet, one of the possible explanations for the origin of the long-sought hypothetical Planet 9, is very similar to the likelihood of capturing a black hole based on gravitational anomalies thousands of light-years toward the center of the galaxy that were recently observed by the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment, or OGLE, based at the University of Warsaw in Poland.
“We’re not saying that it can’t be a planet,” co-author Unwin said. “We’re saying it need not be a planet and the important point is that this extends the experimental search needed to find this object we believe may be in the outer solar system.”
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OGLE reported six microlensing events during which an object bent the light of a star that was under observation. These six unexpected events correspond to objects whose masses are in the range of 5 to 20 times the mass of Earth, such as primordial black holes, which can be thought of as relics of the Big Bang.
OGLE reported six microlensing events during which an object bent the light of a star that was under observation. These six unexpected events correspond to objects whose masses are in the range of 5 to 20 times the mass of Earth, such as Primordial Black Holes, which can be thought of as relics of the Big Bang.
Unwin and Scholtz highlighted in their paper that it is “remarkable” that both anomalies point to new objects of mass between 5 to 20 earth masses and argued that the OGLE observation and Planet 9 may be connected. But an important outcome is that it is much harder to look for a black hole than to look for a planet, they note.
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While a planet reflects the light from the sun and radiates thermal radiation as well, the black hole alone gives no such radiation. However, Scholtz said it is reasonable to expect a dark matter halo surrounds this black hole. “If dark matter can annihilate into observable particles, the halo surrounding the black hole would produce high energy photons which could then be observed in searches for X-ray and gamma-ray sources.”
Unwin and Scholtz highlighted in their paper that it is “remarkable” that both anomalies point to new objects of mass between 5 to 20 earth masses and argued that the OGLE observation and Planet 9 may be connected.
Separately, Witten, who was not involved with the paper, suggests that an army of small, laser-launched spacecraft with accurate atomic clocks similar to the Breakthrough Starshot proposal, where lasers on Earth are used to guide and power ultra-light spacecraft weighing just a few grams each, could send out a thousand of these spacecraft traveling fast enough to reach a distance of 500 AU. Each of these spacecraft would send timing information back to Earth. Slight changes to one of the spacecraft’s clocks could signal that it had intersected the strong gravitational field of the tiny black hole.
The Daily Galaxy, Max Goldberg, via UIC and Gizmodo
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