![]() The same models that produce primordial black holes, Unwin said, also offer the best explanation for how the Higgs mechanism (thought to imbue mass on all particles) and other basic physics emerged into the universe. (Note: It probably won't display at exact scale on your device, but imagine how big it would look if you printed it out so that the white space was exactly as wide as a sheet of paper from your printer.) (Image credit: Jakub Scholtz and James Unwin) There wouldn't be any way to tell the effects of a planet's gravity from that of a primordial black hole of the same mass.Īn image from the paper shows the exact scale of the event horizon of the black hole if it's five Earth masses. If a PBH found its way into our solar system, that black hole would orbit the sun like a planet would, and it would tug on dwarf planets and asteroids just like the theoretical Planet 9 would. Its event horizon would be tiny - about the size of a grapefruit if it's five times the mass of Earth, and the size of a bowling ball at 10 times Earth's mass. And according to some models, they'd be just a handful of times heavier than Earth.Ī black hole of that mass wouldn't look like much of anything, Unwin said. These black holes would be smaller than stellar black holes formed from collapsing massive stars, said James Unwin, a physicist at the University of Chicago and co-author of the paper. "That part of the universe is so dense, it just becomes a black hole," Scholtz told Live Science. These primordial ghosts of the universe's creation would have formed when chunks of that early matter were crushed together so tightly that they condensed into singularities. Related: From Big Bang to Present: Snapshots of Our Universe Through Time But some cosmologists believe that in the first moments of the universe, when everything was hot and dense and rushing away from the Big Bang, and no stars had formed yet, black holes were already emerging. Usually, when we talk about black holes, we mean enormous objects formed when giant stars collapse into themselves, trapping their masses in infinitely dense singularities, surrounded by giant " event horizons" from which no light can escape. But as theoretical physicists, we know that early-universe cosmology can very readily introduce a range of very interesting new theoretical bodies - one of which… is primordial black holes." Primordial black holes are different The most mundane, or maybe the most sane explanation is that it's a planet. "The thing that we realized is that the gravity is the important thing," said Jakub Scholtz, a physicist at Durham University in England and one of the two astronomers behind the idea. The hunt for Planet 9 has gone on for years, with astronomers using visual light and infrared telescopes to scan the outermost parts of the solar system. It's a bizarre theory, usually called " Planet 9," but one that astronomers take seriously. Some astronomers have looked at that strange pattern, run some calculations, and concluded that there must be another planet out there, one that’s 10 to 20 times the mass of Earth and following a wonky orbit that carries it many hundreds of times Earth's distance from the sun. Related: The 12 Strangest Objects in the Universe
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