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Comment by aruggirello | Hacker News Reader

A PBH in our Solar System would quickly become a very popular target for science, allowing us to test both relativity theory and quantum physics at an unprecedented level. And who knows, we might even be able to use it as a slingshot for interstellar travel, or as a gravitational lens - that would be great!

Edit: so, how do we locate it exactly?

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With regards to how you locate it, the paper proposes looking at existing data from FERMILAT, a gamma ray telescope which could possibly pick up anihilations from a dark matter cloud surrounding such a black hole. Since the object itself is so tiny (I’ve never seen a 1:1 scale figure in an astronomy paper before) you need to detect its presence in some other way.

What decides how good a slingshot something is isn't its density or mass (provided the mass >> than that of the object being slingshot), but rather its velocity relative to the sun. Planet 9 travels very slowly relative to the sun, and so is a poor slingshot, regardless of its density.

It took New Horizons about ten years to reach Pluto and this black hole would be on the order of ten times further away from the sun than Pluto. We would of cause still point all kinds of instruments at it from Earth but we would not be able to fly circles around it and throw stuff into it any time soon.

Actually I believe new horizons had a pretty primitive propulsion system and achieved most of it's delta V from a sling shot around jupiter.

More recent solar sails and plasma based propulsion systems have achieves significant improvements since then. If it was a priority I don't see why would couldn't go 10x as far within in the next decade.

Nuclear pulse engine can significantly cut the time.

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