Name: Why There Could Be A Black Hole In Our Solar System
Uploaded: 2020-10-25T18:31:24.000Z
Duration: 4 min 55 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Black holes are some of the most powerful

So, what if I told you that astrophysicists

think there's one lurking in our very own solar system?

rocked the astronomical world to its foundation.

you should know that our planet isn't about

to get sucked up and reappear in another galaxy.

it's at least 20 times farther from Earth

The belt is home to billions of icy objects,

And in 2016, astronomers Konstantin Batygin

orbit the same plane, and in the same direction,

the orbit of these objects looks like this.

Konstantin Batygin: Imagine the plane of the solar system

Narrator: They concluded that this could mean

Batygin: In order to generate this population

of highly inclined, perpendicular orbits,

you need some distant gravitational pull.

Narrator: By their calculation, that gravitational pull

was as large as a planet orbiting our sun.

In fact, they even went so far to give it a name,

Now, of course, if they were to confirm this discovery,

Reporter: Very little is known about Neptune,

No one was able to observe the planet directly.

Now, that could be because finding a planet that far away

is like searching for a needle in a haystack...

and only a vague idea of where the haystack even is.

In a study published in the fall of 2019,

theoretical physicists Jakub Scholtz and James Unwin

proposed it could actually be a black hole.

Not just any black hole, but a primordial black hole.

Jakub Scholtz: Primordial black hole is a remnant

from the Big Bang that came from a very dense region

that almost instantly collapsed into a small black hole

For over 50 years, astronomers have proposed the universe

And we've even observed fluctuations of starlight

which primordial black holes could explain.

Not only that, but Scholtz and Unwin also noticed

that if a primordial black hole orbited the sun,

it would have the same effect on objects in the Kuiper Belt

But whether it's a black hole or a planet,

One idea is that the object was wandering through the galaxy

but for now, this is all just speculation.

James Unwin: If we do do our searches and it turns out

that there is a planet in the outer solar system,

this would be an absolutely incredible discovery.

Such a strange planet on such an odd orbit.

Narrator: But if it is proven that this is a black hole

And the fact that this not only would change

our understanding of solar system physics,

but it also gives us a new window into astrophysics,

and into, potentially into, the fundamentals

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Why There Could Be A Black Hole In Our Solar System

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