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It's hard to imagine a scenario in which the solar system captures a wandering black hole. If it comes in it's going to keep going, or take the hyperbola back o
by jfengel 3y ago
It's hard to imagine a scenario in which the solar system captures a wandering black hole. If it comes in it's going to keep going, or take the hyperbola back out the way it came.
It's not impossible and such scenarios can be constructed. But they're really narrow and it's hard to justify putting a lot of effort into looking for wild coincidences.
- thegrim33 3y agoMaybe you could elaborate? As the solar system already contains bodies with masses both smaller and larger than the primordial black holes mentioned, what would be the issue?
- roywiggins 3y agoall of the stuff I'm the Solar system that we know about probably was here from the beginning, forming out of the same cloud of dust that produced the sun. A black hole would have to wander in from elsewhere and somehow get captured rather than zipping by on a hyperbolic orbit.
- scheme271 3y agoThe relative velocity of stuff that wasn't in the cloud that formed the solar system would almost certainly be really high. So it would take a lot to capture the an extra-solar body. Any bodies from outside the solar system would probably either travel straight through the solar system or do something like what ʻOumuamua did.
- jvanderbot 3y agoIf you draw a box around the solar system, and want a fast moving BH to settle in without rejecting on hyperbolic orbit, you'd just have to throw out another object that's comparable in size, at comparable speed. Momentum conserved. A near miss with one of Jupiters moons might sling the BH into an orbit at slower pace and throw that moon into, say, earth to create our own moon. This stuff probably happens more often than we think, on a galactic time scale.