One example is the process called “spaghettification”, which is often indicated by an astronaut’s fable that campaigned too close to the horizon of a black hole event – the point where no light can escape – and fell in. the head hair. Although her head and legs were just meters apart, the difference in the gravitational forces that carried them would be so great, she would have stretched like spaghetti.
Interestingly, the effect should be even more dramatic, the smaller the black hole. Sholtz explains that it’s about relative distances – if you’re two meters tall, and you fall through the horizon of an event that is one meter from the center of a primordial black hole, the difference between position your head and legs bigger, compared to the size of the black hole. This means your stretching will go much further than if you fell into a stellar a million miles across.
“And so, specifically enough, they’re more interesting,” Scholtz said. Spaghettification was already seen through a telescope, when a star too close to a stellar black hole got 215 million light-years from Earth, and was torn apart (astronauts were not harmed). But if there is a primordial black hole in our own solar system, it would allow astronauts to study this behavior – and much more – up close.
So what does Batygin do of the possibility that the long-sought ninth planet could be a black hole? “It’s a creative idea, and we can’t limit what it does to even the slightest,” he says. “I think maybe it’s just my own bias. to be a professor of planetary science, but planets are a little more common … “
While Unwin and Scholtz root for a prime black hole to try, Batygin is equally fond of a giant planet – stating that the most common types throughout the galaxy are those around the galaxy. one mass to Planet Nine.
“At the same time, most exoplanets erupting stars are similar to the Sun, in this strange realm of being larger than Earth and much smaller than Neptune and Uranus,” he says. If scientists find the desired planet, that is the closest they can get to a window into those other parts of the galaxy.
It is only time to tell if the latest issue will be more successful than Lowell. But Batygin is confident that their missions are completely different. “Every suggestion is very different both in the data they are trying to explain, as well as in the methods they use to explain it,” he says.
Either way, the study for the mythical ninth planet has helped transform our understanding of the solar system. Who knows what else we may find before the hunt ends.
Zaria Gorvett is a leading journalist for BBC Future and tweets @ZariaGorvett
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