Abstract Details

Name: Arun Kenath
Affiliation: CHRIST (Deemed to be University)
Conference ID: ASI2021_126
Title : Planet Nine – Primordial black hole or a Dark Matter object: A comparative study
Authors and Co-Authors : Arun Kenath (Department of Physics and Electronics, CHRIST (Deemed to be University), Bengaluru, 560029, Karnataka, India), Kiren O.V. (Department of Physics and Electronics, CHRIST (Deemed to be University), Bengaluru, 560029, Karnataka, India), C. Sivaram (Indian Institute of Astrophysics, Bengaluru, 560034, Karnataka, India)
Abstract Type : Poster
Abstract Category : Sun and the Solar System
Abstract : The study of Planet Nine has received a lot of attention of late. Planet Nine is a hypothesized planet lurking in our solar system far beyond the orbit of Neptune inferred by a peculiar clustering of six TNO. Earlier it was suggested that Planet Nine could be a degenerate object constituted of DM particles with its characteristic properties. The DM particles could form degenerate objects at earlier epochs which provided a motivation to consider Planet Nine to be such a DM object. If made up of mostly DM particles, such objects would not emit any radiation and therefore not be seen in the usual observational searches. It was also estimated that there could be one such object in the solar system (Oort cloud) volume. Currently there is a lot of ongoing discussions as to whether this Planet Nine is actually a planet or possibly a primordial black hole. PBH are black holes that are created in the early Universe right after the big bang and since they are not formed by the stellar gravitational collapse their masses are much smaller compared to stellar mass black holes. So, for a definitive observation of Planet Nine we need instruments as in the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) and Pan-STARRS. Here we give a comparative study of the two different possibilities i.e. Planet Nine being either a PBH or a DM object. This would be relevant for future observations of Planet Nine. We show that if Planet Nine is a PBH, it will be extremely difficult to detect it due to its small size, angular size, luminosity, etc. On the other hand the signature of the corresponding DM object would be more easily evident.