Astronomers Have a Plan to Detect a Possible Black Hole in Our Solar System - Gizmodo

One possibility is that it’s not a planet at all but a tiny black hole.

As Loeb explained to Gizmodo, it’s possible that primordial black holes are responsible for what scientists think is dark matter in the universe.

“Our paper shows that if Planet 9 is a black hole, then comets residing in the outskirts of the solar system—the so-called Oort cloud—would impact it, get destroyed by its strong gravitational tide, and produce a flare as they accrete onto it quickly, within less than a second,” Loeb told Gizmodo.

“If Planet 9 is a black hole, we expected to see at least a few flares about a year after LSST starts surveying the sky,” said Loeb.

“It would be a game changer for Planet Nine as a primordial black hole scenario.”.

Scholtz, along with his colleague James Unwin from the University of Illinois at Chicago, published a paper last year arguing that Planet Nine might actually be a black hole.

Either way, the LSST project will produce meaningful results, as the absence of black hole evidence could point to other possibilities, such as Planet Nine actually being a planet