I'm curious what math led to that funny exponent in eq.(5): ρ(r) ~ r^{-9/4}.
I'm curious what math led to that funny exponent in eq.(5): ρ(r) ~ r^{-9/4}.
I can think of PLENTY of billionaires to send :)
I assume you object to billionaires because they use a disproportionate share of the world's resources? Spending even more resources on them doesn't seem like it would make that better?
Can anyone imagine something concrete?
Even the Soviets didn't say they were dumb and wasteful.
(I tend to be a bit milder, and just say that the moon landings should be thought of as spending on entertainment, not on science. Manned space flight in general is very cost-ineffective, if you care about scientific bang for your buck.)
I don’t think it’s hypocritical to say that the moon landing was worth it but gearing up to go to a distant black hole is not*
* Is also shiny and has movies
* It's cheaper by a good number of orders of magnitude
* It has massive commercial value (bringing home piles of gold. Well, platinum metals)
* It has actual military implications, which is the main motivator for any government progrem
* It gets to call the military research "planetary defense", and there are more cool movies about that.
No government is getting its act together on that. A distant black hole is right out.
But yes, agreed, it's way too expensive. And so we're not even going to make that happen. That was the point - it's more attractive than neighboring black holes along several different axes, and it's still not worth it.
Refine / cut up your asteroid on the lunar surface, then you need a relatively small amount of dV to put your payloads into a decaying orbit around earth (~1/4 the dV to get into low earth orbit from the surface). Enough heat shielding, and you'll be able to crash your payload into the ocean somewhere for recovery.
Frankly, the biggest issue is that you'd end up flooding the market.
Second - humans need to locate this deposit. Remotely. In the asteroid field. We are still finding out deposits in the habitable Earth regions, because that is a hard task, talking about locating deposits in the Belt is an impossible task, and will remain so for a long time.
Third - we need to get there. Excluding flyby's, the best humanity managed is to deliver two 1 ton vehicles to the Mars. And there we had a luxury of aerobraking to save a lot of fuel. Belt is way farther, there is no aerobrake possibility and we will have to deal with other asteroids along the way. We don't have such tech.
Fourth - we will need to strap engines to the asteroid, remotely, with an hour signal lag. Engines which don't exist in any form today. And we need to get fuel to them somehow. Impossible task.
Fifth, we need a Moon colony with robots or humans.
Sixth - high energy tech on the Moon.
Seven - launch facility on the Moon.
And I've probably missed a few other impossible hurdles, writing this. Then IF all of that would exist, you would need it to be at least as cheap as Earth based mining, which is a pipe dream. Any space tech is more expensive by design, sometimes orders of magnitude more expensive. AND finally there need to be an infinitely elastic market on Earth for this new source of materials. Imagine you will sell a billion tons of platinum tomorrow, the price would crash and never ever recover. You see this yourself in your last sentence.
Not if you launch first, and present after ;)
Studying it might allow us to finally unify GR and QM.
1. Humans aren't going to survive in space for 10 years. It's questionable that they'd even survive a trip to Mars without getting riddled with cancer from the cosmic radiation. Sure, if you built a big enough ship to provide some really effective shielding, it's technically possible, but that ship would be enormous and far beyond our current capabilities. I don't think it's feasible at all to launch such a ship from Earth; it would need to be assembled in space.
2. Project Orion is just an idea on paper; it's not within current technology, because no one ever built it. We don't "have the technology" at all. We don't even have the technology to land humans on the Moon. We did decades ago, but we no longer do: all the people who knew how to do that are retired or dead, so we'd have to start over. Of course, we can build powerful rocket motors easier now since we do so regularly now, so building equivalent Moon-landing capability is no longer as difficult as in the 60s, but a lot of things would have to be partially re-invented (e.g., the lander itself, the rover, etc).
3. Does your time estimate include the time needed to decelerate, so the ship doesn't just zip by the black hole with barely any time to collect data? (And if there's people on this ship, they might want to return to Earth...)
You don't just have to get the probe there. (And which probe? You have to design and build it first.) You have to get it there, have it get data, and have the data come back. Otherwise you've just thrown a rock, which, yeah, if we spent a fortune we could certainly throw a rock out vast distances very quickly.
So, you either:
Do a flyby, which requires a slower speed. New Horizon's speed was good for gathering data from Pluto and sending it all back. The hypothesized PBH is small enough to fit in your duffle and probably much darker.
Enter orbit. Easy enough with a 5-10M object. But the orbit has to be a useful orbit. So either you burn a tremendous amount of delta-v to reduce your tremendous speed so you get a compact-enough orbit; which requires even more energy to get out there, or you craft the orbit such that the object itself helps slow you: but that takes time and more speed means more time.
But small black holes with the same mass as the Earth have the same sucking power as the Earth since it's the mass that does the sucking.
We'd all freeze to death in a few days, but the earth would go right on orbiting as if nothing happened.
If our moon turned into a black hole of its same mass tomorrow there would be even less of an effect. We'd notice we could no longer see the moon, but we'd still have tides just like before.
I'm guessing this refers to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherenkov_Telescope_Array ?
The actual exponent and its workings-out almost certainly comes from Gott 1975, which I do not remember ever having read <https://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1975ApJ...201..296G>, so I cannot do it any sort of justice at this time, but see my comment on Gunn 1977 below.
Theres an early history of pre-NFW power-law dark matter density profiles swept up in ref [34] of the Planet 9 preprint, which is cited just before the equation that piqued your curiosity.
[34] is <https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1985ApJS...58...39B/abstra...> which turns out to be part of a 1984 Princeton doctoral thesis, and I am unfamiliar with it although I recognize its author Edmund Bertschinger as well-known from his later 1980s-2000s work in cosmological perturbation theory and cosmological simulations.
[34] also lists Gunn & Gott 1972, Gunn 1977 and Gott 1975 in the references section (bottom of 1st to top of 2nd column). Surprisingly the Planet 9 preprint lists none of these papers.
However, in a way that could be serendipitous: you might enjoy the "funny exponent"s in many the equations of [34], since some involve powers of -8/9, 8/3, -5/2, among others.
I wrote but abandoned an attempt to tease out the detail using the following two seminal papers.
Gott & Gunn 1972, "On the Infall of Matter into Clusters of Galaxies and Some Effects on their Evolution" <https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1972ApJ...176....1G/abstra...> (PDF via top right box), contemplating a Friedmann universe with a spherical homogeneous overdensity that collapses into a galaxy cluster.
Gunn 1977 <https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1977ApJ...218..592G/abstra...> contemplates a spherical but inhomogeneous perturbation, and arrives at a power law of density \propto r^{-9/4}. It relies on Gott 1975 for that, however. This paper is the basis for a "universality" result which indicates that the shape of an overdensity's boundary is essentially preserved over time, even as the matter within the overdensity collapses into various structures. That universality was convenient at the time to avoid having to treat spirals specially, and is in effect claimed as applicable to a PBH equipped with a DM microhalo in the preprint linked at the top.
The "funny exponent" appears in the text just after eqns (8)-(9b) in Gunn 1977.
All of the NASA/ADS abstracts linked in my comment have PDFs available in the top right box on the page.
From the abandoned first attempt (which grew in length and messiness) I'll save two things: the "curious" equation's r_eq and \rho_eq are fixed at the transition from radiation-domination to matter-domination at z ~ 3200 (47 thousand years after the big bang), after which radiation pressure is insufficient to keep perturbations from growing. The transition is also when scale factor a \propto t^{2/3}, and energy density \rho \propto a^{-3(1+w)} where w is close to 0; self-gravitation in the overdensity causes its \rho to drop more slowly, and furthermore draws in matter from the surrounding ~average density shell.
Renormalization.
Huh? Explain. How does that fit?
It's just a power-law distribution for the density of a halo that forms early around the "Planet 9" primordial black hole.
The density ~ r^{{3/2}^2} is a result from 1970s studies of structure formation shortly after Vera Rubin's work indicated that dark matter halos surrounded spiral galaxies. Rubin & Ford 1970 <https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1970ApJ...159..379R/abstra...> emissions regions of M31, begat Gott & Gunn 1972 <https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1972ApJ...176....1G/abstra...> infall of matter onto galaxy clusters begat Gott 1975 <https://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1975ApJ...201..296G> structure formation and elliptical galaxies begat Gunn 1977 <https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/1977ApJ...218..592G/abstra...> formation of massive galactic halos.
These are foundational to the paper at the top's ref [35], which is quoted just before the "funny exponent".
Roughly, let's start with an expanding Friedmann universe, where we treat galaxy clusters as motes of dust, and smear that out into one or more fluids representing nonrelativistic matter and radiation and other relativistic matter, with an identical energy-density at every point in space in an equatorial slicing, with each slice succeeding a spatially-smaller slice and preceeding a spatially-larger slice. At small scales, radiation pressure stabilizes any overdensities or underdensities in the nonrelativistic and relativistic fluids. Eventually expansion causes a transition from radiation-dominance to matter-dominance, allowing overdensities and underdensities to grow.
The papers by Gott and Gunn above consider the evolution of a spherical perturbation, an overdensity, starting at that transition, studying whether shortly after the transition from radiation-dominance, halos can support the evolution of generic galaxies and galaxy clusters. They can; and the "Planet 9" paper at the very top (albeit by way of its ref [34]) takes that further and applies this halo logic to primordial black holes based on that "universality" result (in Gunn 1977, penultimate paragraph).
Essentially what happens is that the nonrelativistic matter in an overdensity self-gravitates and so sticks around as an overdensity from one slice to the next bigger slice. Moreover, neither cold dark matter nor a primordial black hole radiates that early in the universe, so the overdensity can't revert to average through dissipation. Furthermore, the overdensity's gravitation draws in matter from the "shell" outside it (i.e., the rest of the universe); that's the "infall". If the infall is dissipationless, it sticks around in shells well outside the centre of the overdense perturbation.
All of this combines so that the density of an overdense perturbation drops much more slowly than the density in the rest of the universe. The latter drops like cosmic_time^{3/2} while the perturbation's density drops like cosmic_time^{9/4} (in these 1970s papers; in the age of fast computers one would use a profile like NFW <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navarro%E2%80%93Frenk%E2%80%93...>, and in this "Planet 9 is a PBH" context one might want to think about "bottom-up" hierarchical mergers of microhalos at all length scales: in that case, is "Planet 9" more likely to be a microhalo without a small black hole?).
In the case of the "Planet 9" PBH the (very small) black hole and its (relatively dense) halo of dark matter are essentially noninteracting except for gravitation, because the horizon is so small and cold dark matter basically feels nothing but gravitation. Gravitation (by way of the equivalence principle) can impart some fairly gentle accelerations that can alter the halo, as discussed in the paper linked at the very top.
Practically all of the results above were found using a linear approximation to General Relativity, checked by N-body numerical simulations (they got up to N=32k or so by the time non-power-law halo distributions were found to fit observations better in the 1990s). For the "Planet 9" PBH it is easy to imagine nonlinearities from interactions with early supernovae, however, if the "capture mechanism" is in-place-formation or an early entrainment to the local standard of rest. Even thinking about using a full nonlinear solution, I don't understand how renormalization might be used and or how it would generate the "funny exponent".