A tiny black hole may pass through our solar system once every ten or so years, researchers have suggested, and this could be detected by watching Mars wobble.

Before that, astronomers took black-and-white images of celestial objects using telescopes on Earth. If you were a kid in the 1960s, you grew up with the first images taken on the moon .

According to Smethurst, there may be black holes roaming around the universe, with one lurking even in the outskirts of our solar system. "A lot of stars formed in clusters," she said.

If microscopic black holes born a fraction of a second after the Big Bang exist, then at least one may fly through the solar system per decade, generating tiny gravitational distortions.

The prospect of finding a black hole in our own solar system “is as startling as finding evidence that someone might be living in the shed in your backyard,” Dr. Loeb said in the email.