This can be tracked by miniature flashes of light that will form after a black hole absorbs surrounding objects.
Could a hypothetical ninth planet of the solar system, the “X-planet,” be a miniature black hole? US astrophysicists have figured out how to find out with the LSST observational telescope under construction. An article describing the work was accepted for publication by the Astrophysical Journal Letters.
“If small celestial bodies fall in the vicinity of a black hole, they begin to melt under the influence of heat, which produces gas falling on the event horizon. After that, the attraction of the black hole begins to break them, resulting in characteristic flashes of light,” one of the authors work said, professor at Harvard University Abraham Loeb.
Almost five years ago, two American planetologists, Konstantin Batygin and Michael Brown, said they had found the first traces of the existence of the mysterious X-Planet. So scientists called the hypothetical ninth planet of the solar system, which is located at least 100 billion kilometers from the sun and is similar in size to Neptune or Uranus.
Until scientists found it, the researchers were only able to narrow down the area where it might be located, as well as find new hints of its existence. These failures made many astronomers doubt the hypothesis. Other planetologists have begun to look for alternatives for what the X-Planet might look like and where it might be.
For example, some astrophysicists now admit that the X-Planet may not actually be a gas giant, a large earth-like planet or a “guest” from another star system, but a much more exotic object – the so-called primary black hole.
It is a miniature analogue of ordinary and supermassive black holes, which in mass are comparable not with stars and galaxies, but with planets. As cosmologists suggest, such black holes could appear in the first moments of the existence of the Universe due to the fact that matter was unevenly distributed over its space. The largest of them could survive to the present day – however, they are gradually decreasing due to Hawking radiation.
Searches for “Planet X”
Finding such objects, as Professor Loeb notes, is even more difficult than the classic X-Planet. This is due to the fact that such black holes, unlike the coldest and most invisible planets, do not themselves generate any radiation.
Harvard astrophysicists have found that, nevertheless, the most sensitive telescopes on Earth can still notice the primary black hole. Astronomers came to this conclusion, drawing attention to the situation in that part of the solar system where the “X-planet” or primary black hole is supposedly located.
As scientists noted, they will be located at a point where the attraction of the Sun is weakening so much that a primary black hole the size of a planet will constantly attract clusters of matter from the surrounding space, including fragments of asteroids and comets that fill the outskirts of the solar system.
As a result, according to the calculations of scientists, due to the activity of a black hole, miniature flashes of light will almost constantly occur. They can appear after the attraction of a black hole will tear apart objects with a diameter from a few centimeters to several hundred meters. For existing ground-based telescopes, these flares will be barely visible, but they can be seen by the LSST observatory under construction, which is located at the edge of the Atacama Desert in Chile.
“The LSST observatory has an extremely wide field of view, so it will receive images of the entire night sky twice a week. This is very important, given that we do not know exactly where the X-planet is located. In addition, its high sensitivity will allow us to find traces flashes that produce even the smallest objects approaching a black hole,” Loeb continues.
If the theorists’ calculations are correct, then LSST can find traces of the existence of a black hole in the first three years of operation, provided that it is comparable in mass with Jupiter or significantly less than it. Otherwise, astronomers will prove that such objects in the solar system do not exist, and will also help theorists to impose more stringent restrictions on the permissible masses of primary black holes. This is important for studying how the expansion of the universe went.
