How Many Black Holes Are In The Solar System?

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Dark matter has eluded us for many decades. Even our most advanced particle colliders and sophisticated underground detectors have come up short. But it may be that we can finally solve this mystery with a much simpler experiment, involving a ray of light, a good clock, and the planet Mars.

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Hosted by Matt O'Dowd
Written by Matt Caplan & Matt O'Dowd
Post Production by Leonardo Scholzer, Yago Ballarini & Stephanie Faria
Directed by Andrew Kornhaber
Associate Producer: Bahar Gholipour
Executive Producer: Andrew Kornhaber
Executive in Charge for PBS: Maribel Lopez
Director of Programming for PBS: Gabrielle Ewing
Assistant Director of Programming for PBS: John Campbell

Spacetime is a production of Kornhaber Brown for PBS Digital Studios.
This program is produced by Kornhaber Brown, which is solely responsible for its content.
© 2024 PBS. All rights reserved.

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[WilliamNeacy]

I found my keys under my cat a couple weeks ago. How they got there, is a question science simply cannot answer.

[webslingerable]

I clicked that notification at relativistic speeds.

[jasonrejman]

Hands down this was my favorite PBS Spacetime episode. What an exciting prospect to (potentially) detecting PMBHs. You guys are Killing the exposition of incredibly important physics being conveyed to the lay person. That took a lot of vector fields, I'm assuming.

[houstonisfake]

I was wondering if the PBHs in that mass range would still exist after 13.8 billion years of hawking radiation evaporation, but the calculator I found online says they will live for ~1 sextillion years

[drewwolfe]

To everyone at PBS Space Time: Thank you. In these days of nothing but political commentary, debate, name calling, and the rest of that stuff, your channel brings some relief. I find myself focusing on the universe as a whole and what we know now and what we hope to learn in the future. It brings me hope for us all. Again, thank you for being a rare of light equivalent to that of a gamma ray burst.

[.]

16:30 Camera almost got eaten by micro black hole!

[RussellBeattie]

Apparently, the proverbial Planet 9 that Mike Brown's Caltech team is trying to find could be a grapefruit sized black hole.

[EebstertheGreat]

9:24 "An hour later, your car will be ten meters ahead. That's an entire car length."

Dang, your cars in Melbourne are huge!

[markstyles]

"A ray of light..." "Got it! I can do this." "...a good clock..." "Hmm, this one will do." "...the planet Mars." "I don't feel like going shopping today. Someone else can do this experiment."

[Ellohir]

Great episode, I love how you bring cutting-edge science to the masses :)
Speaking of, I recently read about a paper that explained away Dark Energy as a product of defining the universe as homogeneous, and that the redshift can be explained as an effect of light traversing through patches of void and dense regions of space. I didn't really understand it, I would love to see it in the show :)

[payhemseht]

The subtitles have a significant amount of discrepancies with the audio.
A clear example, at 16:04 audio says "20 years" but subtitles say 30.

[ocircles]

The idea of a black hole passing through our solar system once every decade is terrifying

[michaelmayhem]

1:35 actually I check under the refrigerator or inside the cat but maybe that's just me 😂

[jnawroc]

Could there already be a black hole within the discussed mass range, orbiting stably somewhere in our solar system?

[TheValarClan]

One of the more interesting exclamations as possible candidates for the missing planet beyond Pluto is a primordial black hole. It would have gravitational effects strong enough to do what they’reseeing.

[ThoughtsAreReal]

1:44 Matt seeming to wonder if dark matter is in his...pockets. 😂😂😂

[Denis-tffl]

Why are we assuming these backholes would be flying through our solar system from outside, when they could already be here in orbit and part of the system.

[Secret_Takodachi]

1:55 I was kinda hoping/expecting a "your mom joke" to be the follow-up line. 😂❤

[brown]

I finally got to see you guys show in the initial part of this video what I have always thought what everyone calls dark matter is. A combination of effects from black holes, neutron stars and other collapsing heavy matter that warps space. Stuff that makes the motion in the ocean. 👍

[FlyntofRWBY]

10:18 "Conveniently, the speed of light in the near vacuum of interplanetary space is constant and extremely well known"
Derek of Veritasium: "Or is it?" *Vsauce music plays*