To discover Planet 9, simply open your ephemerides and look for "Neptune".
Was earth not a planet shortly before and after collision with Theia?
The naming pedantry seems ridiculous given that we have such a small sample size.
To steal a quote: All definitions are wrong. Some are useful.
Here is a nice graphic that excludes Ceres https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwarf_planet#Population_of_d...
The motivation for this dwarf planet nonsense was to try to keep the official planet list small so children could memorize them with ease, but that is absurd. We do not remove countries from the map to make it easier for children to learn geography and there are over 100 of them.
It could also allow gravity and Oberth effect acceleration of small probes to meaningful fractions of the speed of light for interstellar flyby missions. Imagine the Oberth effect boost from thrusting in such a deep gravity well.
We don't have enough data to see whether there are unexpected instabilities in detected planetary systems. But it would be an interesting project to look for those.
If the Moon were suddenly transformed into a tiny black hole with the same mass, it would continue to orbit the Earth at the same distance. Ocean tides due to its gravity would continue normally. There would not be much effect except that it would no longer be visible with the naked eye and would no longer reflect the sun's light back to Earth. If you found it in a telescope, you might see gravitational lensing as it passed in front of the star field. Objects like probes or old spacecraft stages orbiting the Moon would continue to do so.
The only danger would be that if things fell into it I suppose you might get dangerous X-ray and gamma ray emissions from its accretion disc that would be a problem at such a close range. That would not be an issue with a primordial black hole much further away.
If there were such an object we could send probes to orbit it and study it, and some experiments may involve firing objects or shooting lasers or beams of particles into it to attempt to learn about the quantum effects at the event horizon. This could be massive for physics, allowing us to access and observe conditions and energies not replicable here on Earth with any current technology.
BTW we don't have any hard evidence that primordial black holes exist, but many theories predict them. So far such predictions around black holes have a pretty good track record. If you made me bet, I would bet on them existing. They are a candidate for some or perhaps even all of dark matter, though even if that's not the case they might still exist. It's possible that the dark matter haloes we can spot with gravitational lensing are clouds of these things. ("Clouds" of course is a misnomer-- the distance between them would be many light years.)
If planet nine is a PBH it means that at some point one was captured by our solar system into a Kuiper Belt orbit. Even if planet nine isn't one, there still may be small asteroid mass PBHs in our solar system, so we still might find one. They would require extremely sensitive X-ray or gamma ray telescopes or highly accurate gravitational models of the solar system to detect.
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 “spaghettified” etc. All the mass would be in that marble. But at a distance it would be the same.
Compared to that object the Earth is mostly empty space. Ordinary matter is not that dense.
Black holes are totally fascinating. They are in some ways the most extreme objects that can possibly exist. If we could study one we could learn a lot.
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 tokens are redshifting.”
Bonus: With the right timing and Oberth maneuver, TARS-GPT might sling itself into Alpha Centauri before we finish arguing whether Pluto’s a planet again.
Worst case: we lose a robot. Best case: we unlock quantum gravity and get a podcast from inside a black hole.
I'd call that a win.
Domesticating fusion would be much easier. That is within sight.
For all it's worth, there's no need to go black hole to explain the lack of visual observation. Objects that far from a star reflect very little if any light and would appear black to a black background.
That's the idea behind this paper (and similar ones like it): since they're looking for the planet's intrinsic emissions, from its internal heat, it's only a single inverse-square law.
With d being ~20 times Neptune's distance and ~140 times Jupiter's, these really are large factors!
Then to show Planet 9 distance they have to get in a car and drive a few miles.
That worked for me.
https://bsky.app/profile/plutokiller.com/post/3lnqm2ymbd22r
If those two spots are the same object, that object is on a high-inclination orbit; but the pattern the Planet 9 hypothesis explains is only compatible with a low-inclination object.
Seriously though, is he one of the people responsible for Pluto's demotion to dwarf planet?
bikenaga•1d ago
codethief•2h ago