Is Planet 9 a Black Hole? With Dr. Jakub Scholtz and Dr. James Unwin

think outside the box for a moment we have a mystery lurking in the outer solar system something tentatively known as Planet 9 as perturbing trans-neptunian objects and more such perturbed objects are found regularly but until we discover that planet should it exist we know essentially nothing about it all we know is that something seems to be there but does it have to be a planet at all ideas of something else lurking out there are nothing new in the 1980s it was advanced though that a small star or a brown dwarf might be distantly lurking in the far outer solar system beyond the Oort cloud orbiting the Sun and occasionally sending a hail of comets into the inner solar system to explain a seeming 26 million year pattern to mass extinctions on earth this object was termed nemesis and has essentially been shown to not likely be the case the subsequent research showed that the Sun may have originally have been a binary system at the time of its formation and that the original nemesis or companion star long ago left the solar system but this new hypothesis regarding Planet 9 doesn't involve another star rather it involves a possible primordial black hole a mysterious grapefruit-sized object left over from the formation of the universe my guests today are looking into whether this might be the solution to the mystery of Planet 9 you have fallen into event horizon with John Michael go do [Music] in today's episode John is joined by Jakob Schultz and James Unwin dr. Schultz was a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and is currently a junior research fellow at the Institute for particle physics phenomenology at Durham University his area of research focuses on dark matter and dark energy James Unwin is an assistant professor working on theoretical particle physics at the University of Illinois in Chicago prior to this he received his doctorate from the University of Oxford and was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of not Rodin dr. Schultz and dr. Nguyen collaborated on a recent paper titled what if planet 9 is a primordial black hole welcome everyone to event horizon with me John Michael Gautier if you enjoy what you hear fall into the event horizon hit the like button and become an active subscriber by ringing the bell James unone and Jacob Schultz welcome to the program thanks for having us now one of the one of the things going on within science news one of the many things going on within science news this year it's the idea of planet 9 and the search for it and you guys have a somewhat different take on that James what made you pose this question in the first place that you know maybe planet 9 isn't the planet what drew you to that yes this was actually quite a nice moment so me and my wife when I went to the local planetarium in Chicago the older planetarium and there was this fascinating documentary which they had in this full sky cinema about this hypothetical new planet at the edge of the solar system and the sort of compelling evidence that was being built for it and some sitting there in the auditorium it came to myself I thought you know the evidence is purely gravitational it need not necessarily be a planet it could be something more exotic so the next day I called up my long-term collaborator Jake Schultz and we really started brainstorming could this be a densed cloud dark matter could this be some sort of a zot sixth are made of hypothetical particles or could this be a black hole potentially and they all sort of give an equal weight until we found this very exciting paper a couple of months later where there was another group who do we analyze some data and seem to be suggesting that earth mass black holes which were there right the right mass range for this sort of hypothetical planet in their outer solar system there's actually some evidence for that in a completely different observational data set and so that this sort of coincidence these were aiming at the same two mass ranges and seemed to be the right number of these things that this situation was not super crazy it really sort of drew us to think of this this could be something worth pursuing seriously the the case for a black hole in the outer solar system now this would be a very low mass black hole right yeah as you say earth mass that's right so most black holes you expect would be the mass of the Sun or or greater because the typical way the black holes form is through that the collapse of an old star and so anything light then that means that probably has a a or certainly has a different origin to the normal black holes that we know now this origin may actually it as a called primordial black holes this origin may be at the very earliest stages of the universe correct yeah so that's the current theory and in fact it's very widely and independently motivated from different considerations in cosmology from there's this idea that in the early universe the universe went through a very rapid inflationary phase and many of these these theories point towards the formation of these black hole objects maybe Jacob can tell you more Jacob what's your thoughts on these early primordial black holes like James said I think I think there are many different ways that people have motivated their existence one that it's kind of fun is the fact that statistic universe early universe is not perfectly uniform it has these small over densities and these are statistical things in other words there are certain spots that are slightly over dense there are certain spots are slightly under dense and there's foster rather over dense you know and then the very very over ten spots are less likely but occasionally you can get such a high density in the early universe that it just immediately collapses into a black hole and and that kind of black hole formation mechanism would actually form very very rarely form or very few black holes in the universe and then there are other ways of doing this where you introduce something more let's go violent during the early universe either the universe suddenly flips from one type of bread sort of ground state into another I sort of in a very similar way you can say for example see when a pot of water boils and you suddenly see these bubbles appear out of nowhere right this sort of the water in that region turned from water to from liquid to gas and so there could be a similar kind of a phase transition happening and there the universe where this is a much more violent process and as a result that can be created very dense regions that immediately then collapse into black holes and this is just some of the ways you could actually reach primarily you know create them in an early University's primordial black holes so it's a really rich field of study and independent of our work I mean it's been there it's actually was I think the first mention of these ideas was by Hawking yeah I remember this correctly I believe it was I think it was it was mentioned in the 1960s and then Hawking really worked on it in the early 1970s as I recall great right and so you see here I mean this is seventies right it's 2020 this is a 50 year old sort of idea so by all means if this was if there was a way to kill this it would have been done by now at least as a is it a self consistently correct idea that doesn't mean it happens in in the universe it just means there's nothing fundamentally wrong with that scenario right and so and then I think over the years we just see more and more ways of making them rather than less and less and so this is why they're fun to think about right okay so the universe does not prohibit their existence or their formation anyway under whatever circumstances but what about evaporation wouldn't these small mass black holes have evaporated by now that's an excellent question and you're perfectly correct there is a certain mass threshold and if a black hole is lighter than that mass threshold it will evaporate in the age of the universe and and turns out this mass threshold is something that some common parlance it's like 10 to 17 grams which not sure is like the right units but essentially it's kind of like a mountain I think this is roughly about a mountain weight look like home so the second size roit asteroid yeah yeah you know chunk of rock several kilometers across right so if of course it would be super tiny right as a black hole but those would evaporate and you if you claim that those exist today you would have to come up with a way of forming those kind of black holes on the girl as it's not just at the beginning of the universe but throughout the history of the universe right which is probably much harder but they care is that the mass range that planet 9 points to us is around the mass of the earth and that tends to be 10 orders of magnitude more heavy than this threshold at which evaporation is important so the chance that these evaporate is isn't it is negligible it's actually not there right it's just it wouldn't so it's in other words it's it's it's a large version of a primordial black hole in well you know black holes actually can span a huge range they go from there sort of small asteroids up to that's almost arbitrarily heavy I think I don't I don't recall quite what upper bound is but certainly you can have them be multi like orders of magnitude heavier than the Sun and born this way so it's actually interesting and like rich area of study right the thing is I think if you if your primary Oh black holes are much more than a hundredth of some masses you start running into some serious constraints on whatever they can exist because they start messing up something because my lunch cosmology but that's a yeah profound but other other than that really like James says it's a we're talking somewhere like 17 orders of magnitude in in range of masses now if we were if we were looking at this object say it's an earth-mass black hole how big would disappear how big would the event horizon of this black hole be it it'd be tiny yeah that's that's right and that's actually something we were very very amused by that if you actually when you actually sit down and calculate this which is a one-line calculation you find that an earth-mass black hole or maybe a black hole ten times the mass of the earth the diameter of the event horizon is somewhere between the size of a tennis ball and a bowling ball so it's something you can hold in your hand potentially probably not a good idea to do that but probably a poor idea one thing we did we focus on our paper though is that this idea that earned these the black holes themselves if you if you go by this this this groups reanalysis of of the google data which which is other thing that the draw draws them towards this possibility of a black hole they indicated that the black kohl should only count for about 1% of the dark matter relic density so that's the the inferred missing matter from our universe the invisible matter sort of and what's interesting is if you have both dark matter and black holes these black holes are actually form a dense ball of dark matter around them and so there's actually two length scales which are important for these objects there's the mass scale of the black hole itself but also the mass hold the ball which surrounds it and that ball actually is extremely large if there was a black hole in our solar system and we calculated that the Associated dark matter halo as we call it or is as it's known is roughly 7 astronomical units in size and that really is roughly the size the distance from Earth to Saturn that's the the corresponding size so this thing is small in some senses but in another way it's also quite large isn't there also a hypothesis that these these primordial black holes could actually account for the missing matter in the universe and that they are a dark matter or at least are an alternative to it so as it stands this is actually something that's been worked on a lot and it's exactly this experiments like oval but also one of them was called eros another match oh there's a Hitomi supreme cam and there's many of these observations that exactly are trying to look for them and as it stands right now for most of that range of dark of black hole masses that we talked about primarily Oh black hole masses they cannot be hundred percent of this missing mass right otherwise we would have already seen some signals of this and so unfortunately primarily the black hole's currently we think cannot actually be all of dark matter right otherwise there would be a very attractive solution in a way right you don't have to add any new particles to the world all they are is just sort of gravitation collapsed small over densities right alas not the case unfortunately but it would seem to me though that if this if this primordial black hole is out there and it's got this halo of dark matter and it's closed relatively speaking this would be a game-changer for studying dark matter wouldn't it if this turned out to actually be a primordial black hole so yeah I completely agree with that sentiment I mean really like the most exciting thing well firstly let's just let's just say for the the record that a planet in the outer solar system of ten earth masses sometimes called a super earth if this up would be completely like amazing unexpected plan is just don't fall in the outer solar system of that size and that's really kind of what drew us to think about more exotic things because it's a very unlikely place to find a planet so maybe it could be something more exotic like a black hole now if there was a black hole out there it's at a distance where you could really send probes to go and sit on top of it and you could study the visit at the black hole but equally so we expect that it would have this halo of dark matter around it and you could equally sit there and try and study the dark matter you could send a sensitive probes to look for annihilations and I think annihilation of dark matter which is when a Dark Matter particle means an anti Dark Matter particle and converts into particles that we know that's actually the way you'd actually try and look for this black hole if it's out there so one of the interesting things which we haven't touched on yet is that to see this black hole you'd actually get neat probably need to use a different sort of telescope - the ones that you actually use to look for planets and the sort of Dark Matter experiments which are running today these things called indirect detection experiments a sort actively looking for these Dark Matter annihilations but they're maybe not looking in the right style to actually identify such a close object what would you expect it to produce like gamma rays that type of thing yeah precisely gamma rays yes abuse x-rays or positrons in particular we proposed in our paper that the the Fermi telescope would be an ideal instrument to actually go and look for this people have used them to look for essentially so the idea is that there'd be a whole galaxy the galaxy would be populated with these small primordial black holes and it's just one member of this state which just accidentally got caught in our solar system and people have used the Fermi data to look for the sort of galactic emissions gamma emissions from the galactic population and the extra galactic but looking for the local emissions or of a black hole in orbit is something which hasn't really been undertaken and so that's actually really interesting directions it's a move forward I would say I think I think to be fair I think the fact that the experimental collaboration has not looked for a black hole orbiting the Sun you know that is a very reasonable thing not to do right so I wouldn't call that a blind the direction that they didn't explore because no reason necessarily for it in the context of looking for planet nine it becomes yes exactly Pelin case for doing this and it would also be close I mean you'd have a pretty good chance of detecting these gamma rays if it were you know they were streaming off this black hole at this distance right something better better depends a lot on the rate at which these dark matter particles annihilate and it depends a little bit on the position of the orbit at the black hole but if it's there there's a there's a pretty good chance of seeing it it's just the turn traps perhaps it appears in the data in it somewhat differently in fact we expect it to appear in the data very differently from the traditional search as people do for objects which are radiating gamma rays I think it will amber it though that differently and and I think this is a very nice intuitive thing to look to think about is that normal x-ray sources those are sort of very distant stars or pulsars or things like this so those are already fairly exotic objects but those are objects there are you know light-years or hundreds or thousands of light-years away right and so as a result they don't appear to move on the sky at all because no matter what velocity they go at essentially they're so far that that motion is impossible for us to notice now this black hole if it there instead of Planet nine that one is moving somewhat appreciably on the sky right roughly couple degrees in the last ten years of the time that the Fermi telescope has been observing it and so as a result what is a standard search for a stationary source you just look at the same point of the sky and see if you get keep getting photons from there at a higher rate then you would expect right then the surrounding area but if this source is moving you get a bunch of photons in one spot but a year later you know a bunch of these photons are somewhere else right they're coming from a different direction and so this would kind of look like maybe there was a photo like a fluctuation in number of photons for a particular direction but it's no longer there and that's just because the source moved a little bit and it's no longer the right direction to look at right and so you can see how it is it's possible that even though we get enough photons from this object to actually be able to find it because it keeps moving it always fails to look to appear as something significant and only when you go through data with the intention of looking for moving things you would actually spot it which is what we plan to do and on that we have to take a break I'm joined today by James Unwin and Jacob Shultz and when we come back we'll discuss gravitational anomalies in the outer solar system that may indicate either planet 9 or the primordial black hole back in a minute [Music] be sure to LIKE subscribe and share the video and now back to John and we're back with James Unwin and Jacob Schultz now part of this is about convergence you know you see two sorts of phenomena going on in the outer solar system that seemed to arrive at the same sort of answer could you explain it okay I think this was a really this is driven by this like you say convergence because there are two experiments or you could say in two classes of experiments that point in the same direction despite the fact they're looking for two very different things in particular there is this trans-neptunian object anomalies that point at an object orbiting the Sun that has mass somewhere between five and 20 Earth masses and then there is the reanalysis of the ogle data that shows that there seems to be six lensing events gravitational lensing events that all have a common scale of or can be interpreted in terms of a common scale of objects roughly between let's call it one and twenty earth masses and so this overlap white flag to 20th masses as one and twentieth masses that's a you know that really is a uncanny coincidence right so you have an uncanny coincidence between two separate gravitational anomalies I guess you could call them that have been detected in the outer solar system yeah that's what we call them in the paper well let's be clear that the outer solar system has a number of unexpected anomalies I know that you I saw that you had a very nice video summarizing this on your channel but the anomalies which have seen the our solar system essentially look at anomalous orbits or of certain objects which are out past Neptune some of these seem to be going in the wrong way some of them seem to be perpendicular to everything else some of them are very high inclination which is difficult to explain and don't really show up when people do simulations of the formation of the solar system and this is kind of one class of anomalous observations and altogether they are what really makes the case for a new object in the outer solar system and you can do simulations and ask what sort of new object you need to reproduce all these odd odd orbits and what people have seen is that you need a planet which is roughly ten times the mass of Earth and maybe 300 times further from the Sun than Earth three three hundred to a thousand times and that's that's interesting but all it tells you is you need to change gravity a little bit and a planet does that but so does a bunch of other stuff and we'll see we puzzled this over a little while and then we came across these other anomalies as different class of anomalies which is this experiment called Google there's looking for these things called micro lensing of events so that is when they look towards the host of stars and they wait to see if an object passes in front of them a star and when it does it bends the light slightly and appears to brighten the star and what was exciting is that there's this telescope called Eagle the optical gravitational lensing experiment and they actually saw some candidate events which had this they call them ultra short lensing events and that would be indicative of a set of objects which have roughly the mass of about ten times the mass of Earth and with a population which when interpreted in terms of black holes would make these roughly one percent of the dark matter and that really is kind of we have these two anomalies the first one is coming from looking at the local orbits which is telling us we need at an earth-mass object in the outer solar system and then we have this micro lensing telescope which is telling us that we need ten earth mass objects moving around the galaxy in front of different stars and we looked at these two things and we just thought this could be a black hole and yeah it was quite a remarkable moment of you know it really clarified things in our head as this is how this we should really sit down and try and make the case for this in the outer solar system now when you first realize that there was a convergence between these two gravitational anomalies where were you hey I can actually remember this very well we were in the Simon's Center in on Long Island and there's this very nice side room with a board and we were just discussing things and uh it clicked suddenly you saw that there is these two different things that point in the same direction or the same mass scale you know it says particle theorists I think this we're really trained as particle theories both of us this is the kind of thing we look for we were trained to before we're two very different not necessarily connected fields or observations have a single type of explanation and then relieve me now this was covered great the spooky moment too at the same time we should stress that these are is a tentative observations that particularly the the evil one well both of them but what's really exciting is that we can very much expect that if these are real phenomena both the the lensing events and the anomalous orbits we will continue to get data in in future experiments and this could very much strengthen the case for both of course one could go away and but still it's exciting time when you're getting data which is telling you that something unexpected might be going on exactly I have to ask you a question with us with this very tiny black hole can these things accrete material and grow can they be seed black holes for say supermassive black holes I think it's a great question and I'm gonna actually up the ante on this a little bit as it turns out this black hole in fact is if the Hawking temperature of this black hole is so little that in fact just the photons from C and B are feeding it already and making it grow a little bigger you know one photon at a time so as a result it's actually growing even if it doesn't meet any gas or any other material it's just very slowly growing and it will leak in fact not really change its mass with this process much over the course of the history of the universe now if it were to encounter a cloud of gas or you know say it really gets extremely lucky and hits an asteroid yeah it would eat that material right but the point is that actually where this black hole is hanging out this is 300 times the distance from Earth earth to some distance there's in fact actually almost no material whatsoever right I think the estimate that of the amount of material around that orbit is far less than the mass of that black hole so unfortunately unless it gets somehow extremely lucky right it is very unlikely to really say you know increase its mass by a fraction of it's already all the mass it already has so now if you were to take that black hole somehow managed to you know strip it of the solar system and you know shove it say a through some really dense material I plunge it into the Sun or do something really really crazy with it yeah I could grow more that's certainly the case but it would take a lot to actually get it into a region with where the density is high enough for it to be meaningful I have to ask a question what would happen if such a black hole encountered earth would it actually completely destroy the planet and take that material in or would it just not be anything like that I think right so probably actually I would say the thing there would be far more dangers from this is that if you have a 5 or 10 earth mass object fly by the earth within sort of reasonable distance as in passing by almost touching that in fact the gravitational field from that thing is much stronger than the gravitational field of the earth so it would probably actually just you know sort of people would start falling upwards into this thing right it's so it's not quite a destruction of the earth as this complete stripping of the earth of anything that's not nailed down right so now you this is a wild guess I should say the other risk of course is if one of these objects so this thought the one we talked about is in the stable orbit but if there is one of these objects enters the solar system you would worry that it would perturb all of the astronauts and junk at the edge and and send that hurtling towards the planet and that makes a the apocalypse events or you know the extinction level event substantially more likely than the the black hole itself approaching us in fact actually sub 1 both James and I worked with has worked on some scenarios like this the idea that you know this is Lisa Randall and their collaborators worked on the fact that they're certain Dark Matter scenarios that make the make the solar system sort of go through a brief period of acceleration that liberates some of these asteroids and then you know from time to time you expect to hit them and cause global extinction she actually has a nice book on this called dark matter in the dinosaurs I think yeah yeah that's absolutely fascinating now the episode so the the the primordial black hole could have been responsible for the extinction of the dinosaurs we're not saying that yeah I think this I think that it would take a lot more effort from us before we could make any statement that you know is a substantial reasonable well what's interesting is that you know and so so the actual that the basis for our collaborators work on on this extinction-level events is because you can get periodic asteroid strikes there's some tentative evidence for that but but really the big takeaway is that these are sort of hypothetical and and ideas in theoretical physics that seems somewhat detached and reality can actually intersect with daily life in meaningful ways be this perturbing orbits in the outer solar system or sending asteroids on dangerous collision paths if that's what you call daily life if that's what you like but the fact that dinosaurs are gone and we are around is a definitely an important aspect of our life right so it's also very handy it's it's a good thing that they went extinct right from from a mammalian point of view yeah exactly exactly I would just adds to this one thing about this planet 9 orbit is that I think the typical orbital time is of order 10 years if I remember correctly and so as a result whereas global extinctions are on the order of 70 million years right so this is thousand times less frequent and so it would be I think pretty hard to cause global extinctions with an object that sort of orbit so frequently right because in some sense if it was doing this he would expect it to happen every 10,000 years and we certainly didn't notice global extinction every 10,000 years so this is quite there that would be a really hard stretch this actually is a scenario people have looked at in the past there's this thing called the nemesis planet which or which is thought to be some sort of dark planet like large planet on the outside of the solar system that was orbiting and periodically throwing comments towards the other asteroids towards the the earth all you know that was that was actually a that was actually a star wasn't it I think it was yeah theory from that was from long ago though from direct searches right because all of these ideas are interesting possibilities and so just to bring it back onto topic up a point one of our bond lines is that you should think about the interesting even if it seems a little bit statistically or unlikely or it's built on some assumptions which might not be completely solid yet you know but have some mmm support in the data if these driving towards interesting ideas that have testable hypothesis and and and you know would would have a significant impact on our understanding of cosmology and particle physics then you should really take these somewhat seriously and if there is the the capacity in the experiments or if the date are publicly available it can be well worth and very profitable to look for these things well it could be you you could make the argument that the most statistically unlikely thing in the solar system is us and yet here we are so so an idea of a small black hole out there is not that far-fetched not not as not as far-fetched as our own existences here on this planet a very fun point all right gentlemen we have to take another break we'll be back in a moment and we will go deeply deeply into what it means to have a black hole in your star system be sure to LIKE subscribe and share the video and now back to John and we're back with James on one and Jacob Schultz now gentlemen this would be one of the most profound discoveries in the history of science that we have a black hole located close to us this is typically something that is envisioned to be varied if you know distant from us and that there wouldn't be one near pie that we could study but it's also easy to envision that if we did find this we have one heck of a laboratory sitting out in the outer solar system for all areas of physics really absolutely so what what would that do to revolutionize our understanding of science what what would that discovery do for us James oh my god I can go ahead yeah so well there's a few things which would be immediately by exciting firstly we'd learned that primordial black holes exist which at the moment is still a very tentative idea though these these ogle events that we sort of used as our motivation discussed earlier they are like the first hints possibly but the evidence still needs to be showed up so if we found one in our solar system immediately we learn something and that tells us that the early universe there was something pretty dramatic going on to actually form these things not only that it tells us the energy scale at which these things were forming because generically you expect these to form at some single or or sum or form a rat with a mass distributed around some single scale or some set of scales so that is an immediate piece of information you gain the next thing is firstly we don't really understand black holes very well we're starting to understand them and we've been studying them for a century I suppose but you know you could send a probe out there to actually sit on top of this and maybe try and tease out as some of the eye some new information about how black holes work and what it means to you know being the strong gravity regime the other thing is these things are covered surrounded by a ball of dark matter and dark matter again is something we know incredibly little about so to actually go to a site where these things are you could try and for instance scatter them off material you could look for their annihilations really they would tell us about this huge piece of our universe that we're missing 80% of the matter in the universe is dark matter and so you know you would really expand your understanding of the universe cosmology and the history of the solar system it would really be a very rich resource my other question is can either of you think of anything that we might do say it's out there would there be anything that we could hypothetically do with this black hole as far as far as maybe generate energy with it or do anything with it would it be of any use to us in the far future I seen it was actually interesting to see that the people are debating this you know either colleagues urge and general public you see people debating something such as maybe you should use it as a way to get rid of our trash or you know exactly generated energy and I'm certainly not an engineer I'm not sure I can test all the feasibilities but it is a really far object right as in the the Voyager has been he's roughly the right distance away from the Sun right now or maybe it's about 100 au this is maybe 300 to 1000 and it took it you know closed the sort of signal fraction of a century right and so this is a really distant object so at our current technology level and time scales it's it would be very difficult to access it in a sort of meaningful way right where say you managed to extract energy out of it or anything oxygen goggles on though if you want for yeah technology gets much better and then there is certainly you could use black holes by just rubbing matter into them and essentially converting it into energy at fractions of oh I think you're actually a couple percent of the rest mass right we'll get radiate away in in various x-rays and things like this so there and if you were to able to capture this that would be great right there's also other things like 10 Rose process where you extract that if you have a black hole that seeing the angular phantom so yeah maybe somebody's sending all our nuclear waste there but then putting your nuclear waste on a on on a rocky and sending up into the spot sky it's a risky risky business that's yeah and then the question is how would you get the energy back maybe you could build a really powerful laser at the black hole site and then you know beam it at the earth but that seems like kind of a risky business right so maybe I mean maybe you could build a space station out there but it sounds like a lot of efforts there's lots of planets we could go to first I think you really want to get rid of trash you could you have the Sun yeah yeah so it might be easier to send it over there in that direction yeah I I would say that actually I think collecting the amount of luminosity the light we're getting from the Sun if you can build a station out there it might be much better to build a light collection station close to our orbit right off the earth for then again not an engineer it just seems to be more practical to sort of focus around here it would be a research lab so if there's a lot like that it will be a research lab and it would be a lot of fun research lab exactly yeah the like James pointed out a number of things we could learn yeah would be amazing now you mentioned Voyager now we have two voyagers and they're on their way out of the solar system and they're still sending back data at last I heard are either of them heading in the right direction to be perturbed by by this object or they just things we don't know actually they the paths of the the budget crafts I think place some limits on the possible orbits of this hypothetical object so the thing is though the wet what we know is just we see the effect very indirectly by looking at the orbits of these things these rocks in the outer solar system and you curb them in at all in a whole bunch of different ways by adding the mass source and in in various different orbits and by changing the mass by a small amounts and the only way to actually track all this because it's a very complicated system is via simulations so what people have looked at is they've looked at how can i narrow down the possible orbits of this thing and what's interesting is you know these boy 2 1 and Voyager 2 or they are giving us information about that because you would see it if they suddenly went you know bearing off-course in some interesting fashion you're not quite there yet right but they definitely put limits yeah so they basically eliminate more than they would actually indicate well I mean currently currently yeah if their trajectories did alter in a meaningful way an unexpected way that could be indicative of a noose or any gravitational source out there which would be confirmation but since they currently are not then it's then it's a normal result and it therefore it implies a restriction in the in the space of orbits but I think we should actually say this is a welcome thing I mean of course if you saw the deviation you'll be fantastic but in fact pinpointing better and better where this orbit is is also useful information right it's so far they they're definitely not ruling out the planet 9 as an idea yeah they're just limiting where it could be which is really good for the searches for it so in that sense this is just as welcome information as yeah or at least as well now I have a question and I'll ask both of you one at a time James first James how likely is it that there is something out there I won't say primordial black hole or planet but how confident are you that there is something to be discovered out there based on you know these these indications that we have yeah it's an interesting and very scientifically valid question and I think most people including the people who have built their careers on on this planet 9 hypothesis would be up front and say you know in all likelihood it's difficult to envision planet Oh planet out there and one of the reason or any object and one of the reasons is it's just statistically unlikely that a large object falls in these sort of orbits the most likely event is it's a bias in the way we collected the data of one that we haven't properly accounted for that said the independent pieces of of observations which we're sort of piecing together they do paint a pretty interesting and compelling picture that there could be something out there so really we just need more data more better data's just all science and I'm not a gambling man so I can't I'm not sure how I would say it would be amazing if there was something out there and that there is there is a nice evidence pointing towards that that possibility Jacob your answer I I think I would very much agree with James ascribing a particular number so this is a very difficult thing you know certainly people speak of certain sort of one in some chance that this is a statistical fluke rather than an actual data that's pointing in things to do towards existence of something out there but if there is anything that I would have said I learned over my long career is that humans are fairly bad as a group at estimating the lack of their knowledge and or due to true uncertainties that go into things and and that's why we are always trying to be careful as scientists to you know really like James says look for more data and see where the dice falls at the end right and that's - all right you mix this you make a hypothesis and then you try and look for that you test it yeah you look for the observable evidence and you don't find it points let me make more let me interject to make a positive point which is that there are we expect there to be a bunch of rogue planets roaming around the the galaxy and if the primordial black holes make 1% the dark matter then is also a bunch of primordial black holes roaming here and even though the chance of capturing either one is relatively small there's a whole lot of star systems out there and some of these star systems by statistics a handful of these star systems will be special and will catch the odd extras extrasolar object and so it could just be them we're the special one and gets this extra rare visitor from some other origin so yeah I'm not sure I like the idea of a solar system that got lucky number one having a habitable planet with intelligent life on it and there also happens to be a black hole in what I would say though is as much as I agree with you you know right what are the odds of two things happening but once you know one of them happen right right because we know there is intelligent life or at least we cast ourselves as one right then the then you were only talking about the probability of the other thing happening right you know a fun and ology is you know winning million dollars is very unlikely in a lottery right but once you know you've won the lottery right the odds of you having $1,000,000 is much higher right you still could have won a much much smaller price but that million-dollar price has become just much more likely right and I think this is the scenario once you kind of start doing this sort of are willing to take the evidence for Planet nine to be higher and higher as we acquire more data the probability that this might be a black hole is also not as unreasonable right given also the ogle observation and so so this is not quite the same as two independent things happening at the same time which is what makes this kind of an interesting scenario anyway all right my last question for you what are the next steps how do we find this black hole if it's there so as we pointed out I think and this is what we try to show in the paper is that you we do expect because the black hole cannot be most of the dark matter did you expect there to be some dark matter around this black hole and in many many models of dark matter this dark matter would be an violating in other words could turn dark matter inside dark matter particles would actually turn into photons high-energy photons and if this was happening then essentially all of our data of observations of the full sky in either x-rays or gamma rays or any other radiation might in fact already contained evidence for this kind of object and so our plan is not to go through some of the data sets in particular we've been over the last two weeks looking at the fermi large area telescope dataset and finding a good way to find a moving point source of the sky and you said you were astronomy right it's a finding very dim moving objects on the sky is not an easy easy task right in fact this is it's a whole industry of looking for asteroids right this is exactly the same idea and if you don't know the way the asteroid is moving it's been challenged if you have some kind of indication of it maybe that's a little easier and so we're hoping to learn from the techniques that I used in these other fields and in fact use also other techniques that may not be used in in asteroid hunting some people actually said that's very interesting papers where they point out some ideas that might be very useful what's rather interesting is that we've been sort of playing with the data and we try to sort of insert a track in other words insert data what it would look like if there was a such an object to see if our algorithms would pick up on it and sometimes they do sometimes they don't when the source is very dim you know you just don't get that many photons you know it's tough luck what's really interesting is that when you actually look at the data and your your method the algorithm we have currently is sort of barely picking up on it if you actually just squint with your eyes a little bit you in fact see the track in the data like you know turns out our vision is a very well-trained algorithm for looking for patterns right and so that actually suggests to us that we should start employing things like you know neural networks and and machine learning to look for these patterns in this on the sky to look for these for this kind of signal and so this is the direction we're really gonna go in in the next couple weeks and possibly months actually to train a new let work to spot moving objects on the sky alright gentlemen we are out of time amazing stuff I hope you'll come back especially if you find something we do all right thank you for joining us like whether or not planet 9 is indeed a primordial black hole remains to be seen but why not we tend to Center thinking towards a planet is the most likely explanation for the gravitational anomalies present in the outer solar system but why not a small black hole do we suffer from planet bias regardless of what's found in the outer solar system to account for the anomalies it's sure to be something very different than anything we've ever seen before whether it's an ejected super earth a class of planet that our solar system curiously lacks despite them being common everywhere else in the universe or the core of a failed gas giant or even a primordial black hole it seems that the answer to this mystery will be satisfyingly weird John did you recover the candy from the car well is left of it mostly wrappers oh dear that is unfortunate more candy is on my list of things to do today I'm gonna be out all night running errands busy day John absolutely I have a list all turned up for Halloween we're going to have to efficiently distribute the candy and I'm gonna need your help I can't be buying too much or this possum is gonna get sick don't you threaten me with productivity what are you gonna have to be productive it's Halloween and I'm gonna need help especially while I'm in costume you mean the pinko costume what no I'm going as a pirate like last year I already had the hat productivity efficiency and cost cutting and penny-pinching is this another ploy to get me to approve your hat budget again it's just six grand removed some zeros John preferably all of them I never get anything I want and on that note join us next week for another venture into the world of the outer solar system see you then you

Channel: Event Horizon

Views: 277,292

Rating: 4.7363868 out of 5

Keywords: planet, nine, black, hole, astronomy, space, wow!signal, godier, event horizon john michael godier, event horizon, batygin, mike brown, nemesis, nibi, nibiru, is planet nine a black hole?, what if planet nine is a black hole?, jakub, scholtz, james unwin, asmr, dark matter, primordial black hole, oort cloud, astrophysics, outer solar system, could planet 9 be a black hole?, planet x

Id: ZLSiFl0FfWw

Length: 50min 59sec (3059 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 31 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/Zardotab]

If so, it's not "Planet 9", but rather "Hole 1".

[u/ijustwantedtopostthi]

The chances of it being a black hole are so slim. It would make more sense if it was a ancient cold brown dwarf, which we are surrounded by many of those.