Sorry, Pluto, You’re Still Not a Planet, but Neither is Planet Nine, Apparently.

Some freaky tomfoolery at the outer edges of the solar system caught the attention of a bunch of scientists about five years ago. The freaky tomfoolery in question concerns a smattering of unconventional orbits of objects on the outer rim of our solar system. Scientists originally pointed to a theoretical “Planet Nine,” since gravity would be a likely culprit. Now, however, a new idea is on the [event] horizon.

According to a couple of physicists, however, said gravitational culprit may well be a black hole, not a planet.

Decoding the Mystery Thus Far

The most prominent theories to date suggested that Planet Nine (or as some call it Planet X) is about fifteen times more massive than Earth. They also suggest that it’s somewhere between 45 billion to 150 billion km away from the sun. The distance would make such a planet difficult to spot with telescopes because of the minuscule amount of light from the sun.

Typically, scientists look for objects like Planet X by trying to detect gravitational bending around such objects. Typically, light or radio waves are great indicators.

A Black Hole, However… A black hole with the mass of a planet would most certainly be enveloped in dark matter. In this case, astronomers estimate it could be a field up to a billion km surrounding the black hole. So how do we detect such an object? Well, researchers theorize that dark matter particles and dark antimatter particles within that field could interact, which would release a gamma-ray burst. Such a gamma flash would most certainly give us a good look at what we’re dealing with out there.

So that’s exactly what the physicists will do.

They’ll examine public data from the Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope. That particular piece of wonderfulness has been orbiting and gathering data since 2008.

Regardless of whether or not they find a black hole, the research is sure to reveal some interesting new information about the interaction between dark matter and dark antimatter.

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