While most of us grow up with the knowledge that there are eight planets in our solar system, for several years astronomers have theorised about the existence of a ninth planet.
The mysterious planet is often referred to as ‘Planet Nine’, and is believed to lie in the outermost regions of the solar system.
Now, scientists from at Durham University and the University of Illinois at Chicago have thrown a spanner in the works with claims that Planet Nine may not be a planet after all.
Instead, Jakub Scholtz and James Unwin believe that Planet Nine may be a primordial black hole.
Speaking to phys.org, Mr Scholtz explained: “Our work started when James and his wife Laura went to the Chicago planetarium and saw a short documentary about Planet 9.
“It must have captured James' attention, because he called me the next day and we started figuring out whether there is any other object that could be out there mimicking a planet.
“We came up with a number of fun scenarios: Bose stars, ultra-compact dark matter halos, primordial black holes—and several other possibilities.”
The team analysed data collected by the University of Tokyo, and found that a primordial black hole would have roughly the same mass as the predicted mass of Planet 9.
Mr Sholtz said: “The final pieces really came together when we realized that the dark matter haloes that surround primordial black holes would be a way to observe Planet 9 if it was a black hole, because of the X-ray/gamma-ray signal it gives off.
“In some sense, the objective of our study really was to convey the message that the idea of a primordial black holes orbiting the sun is not as absurd as it may seem, and that maybe we should be paying greater attention.”
The team now hopes to probe their hypothesis further to confirm whether of not Planet Nine is a primordial black hole.
Mr Scholtz added: ”Our future research will mainly be focusing on exploring various existing datasets and looking for evidence (or lack thereof) of moving sources in the sky.”
