Here's how boffins can prove Solar System's mysterious 'Planet Nine' is actually a small black hole

[Judi Lynn]

Here's how boffins can prove Solar System's mysterious 'Planet Nine' is actually a small black hole – wait, what?
There may be a small black hole on the edge of our Solar System? 2020, please stop

Fri 10 Jul 2020 // 05:14 UTC

Katyanna Quach

The suggestion that the Solar System's hypothesized Planet Nine is actually a small black hole could be solved by searching for outbursts of energy using the Vera Rubin Observatory, scientists say.

The observatory, previously known as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), has been under construction in Chile since 2015, and is expected to begin observing the heavens this year. It will be home to a giant telescope that employs a “three-mirror, three-lens optical assembly” to focus light from the night’s sky onto the “world’s largest CCD camera.”

Avi Loeb and Amir Siraj, chairman of the Department of Astronomy and an undergraduate student, respectively, at Harvard University believe the new telescope will be able to determine whether or not Planet Nine, a hypothetical object, is a black hole or not within a year of the instrument becoming operational.

Planet Nine, if it exists, has remained elusive since it was predicted by a pair of astronomers at the California Institute of Technology in 2015. Fruitless searching for the strange body has led some scientists [PDF] to believe it’s not visible at all because it may, in fact, be a black hole.

More:
https://www.theregister.com/2020/07/10/planet_nine_black_hole/

[yonder]

1. Interesting and thanks.

I've mixed up different accounts of a Planet 9/Planet X/Nibiru for years - mostly from sketchy sources - and predictions that whatever it is may one day cause "the end".

Maybe there really is something out there?