![]() All black holes we know of in the universe come from the deaths of massive stars. Small black holes (and "small," here means planet-size) are very interesting to astronomers. So now, astronomers have proposed an alternative hypothesis: Maybe Planet Nine isn't a planet at all but rather a small black hole. ![]() But even our deepest, most sensitive scans have turned up nothing. If Planet Nine is indeed out there, it may be on a part of its orbit that takes it so far away from the sun that we can't observe it with current technology. Plus, there's the glaring reality that, after almost five years of searching, nobody has found Planet Nine. In other words, these TNOs only appear to be clustering because of our "biased" observations. For instance, researchers reported in February that the evidence for Planet Nine - particularly the clustering of TNOs - could be the result of where astronomers point their telescopes, Live Science reported. The observations of TNOs may be biased, so astronomers may not have monitored a fair sample, meaning the odd clustering may be an artifact of our observation strategy rather than a real effect. The evidence for Planet Nine isn't conclusive, though. The gravity from such an object could draw these TNOs into clustered orbits, the idea goes. ![]() They dubbed this hypothetical world Planet Nine. The probability of that clustering happening by pure random chance is less than 1%, which led some astronomers to suspect that there might be a massive planet out there - something bigger than Neptune that orbits more than 10 times farther from the sun than Neptune does. A few of these TNOs have oddly clustered orbits that align with one another.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |