It's the end of the world as we know it... again. In the last few weeks the tabloids
and conspiracy theorists have been busy with yet another dire prediction that
Nirbiru aka Planet X or Planet nine will trigger earthquakes, floods and generally the end
of the world. This time it was meant to be on November 19th but as you can see
we're all still here. The problem here is that Planet X, Planet 9
and Nibiru are often used to describe the same phenomena of the
thoroughly debunked theory first put forward by Nancy Lieder in 1995 that a
planet-sized object which she called Planet X and about four times the size
of the earth on a highly elliptical orbit would pass close by to the earth
in 2003 and its gravitational effects would effectively destroy the earth. This
theory has been respun to try and fit the end of the last cycle in the Mayan
calendar in 2012 and more recently to biblical passages with its effects said
to occur on the 23rd of September 2017 and then November 19th 2017. The
mysterious Nibiru which has never been seen by any serious astronomers, NASA or
ESA let alone had its orbits plotted has
also mutated from a physics defying planet to now a brown dwarf just beyond
the edge of our solar system. Again nothing has ever been seen and more
importantly no gravitational effects noted that match its description. If it
were to be that close to the earth we would all see it in the sky and not in
some dodgy photographic anomalies or 30-year old satellite data. But the term
Planet X is a real one and was first used by the astronomer Percival Lowell
in 1906 to describe what was thought to be a missing planet which was causing
irregularities seen in the orbits of Uranus and Neptune. Lowell proposed that
the missing planet would be about seven times the mass of the earth and about 43
AU or six point four billion kilometres from
sun. Although Lowell searched in vain until his death in 1916 he never found his
planet X. The search for a missing planet resumed in 1929 when 22 year-old Clyde
Tombaugh joined Lowell Observatory Tombaugh's job was to photograph sections
of a night sky taking two images of the same area two weeks apart and then using
a blink comparator he was able to see if there was any difference between them.
This would show up any objects such as a planet as a moving object against the
star background. After looking at about two million stars over one and a half
years Tombaugh saw a moving object not far from the location where Lowell had
predicted it should be. This new planet was called Pluto and the search for
Planet X was over, or so they thought. Barely a month had passed since Pluto
was discovered when further observations cast doubt on Pluto being Planet X.
Firstly there was no visible disc that would been expected when looking at a
planet, secondly it was very dark it was more like a distant star than a planet
something that was rather strange for an object that should be large enough to
affect the orbits of Uranus and Neptune, this meant that it was either a darkest
planet yet discovered or it was very small and thirdly it had an elliptical
orbit slightly inclined against the solar plane much more like that of a
comet or an asteroid. Over the next almost fifty years further observations
and calculations downgraded Pluto's mass from seven times that of the earth which
Lowell had assumed, to around north 0.1 times that of the earth. By 1978
astronomer James W. Christie observed Pluto's moon Charon. By measuring
Charon's orbit around Pluto it was possible to accurately work out that
Pluto was about 1/500th of mass of the earth, far too small to be Planet X.
When Voyager 2 visited Neptune in 1989 the measurements it sent back showed
that Neptune was smaller in mass than was first thought when. JPL reran the
ephemeris calculations on the orbits of Uranus and Neptune with the new data the
earlier discrepancies disappeared along with the need for a Planet X to account
for them. Even just after Pluto's discovery in the 1930s there were calls
from some astronomers but it should not be called a planet, it was just too small and
in 2006 it was officially downgraded to a dwarf planet. By 2014 there have been
six other objects of similar size to Pluto found in the Kuiper belt, the ring
of mostly frozen debris leftover from the formation of the solar system. It was
the discovery that some of these large bodies known as TNO's or
Trans-Neptunian Objects had rather strange orbits. When looked at as a whole
nearly all of them had their orbits clustered in one direction rather than
being spread out as would be expected. By 2016, 7 more TNO's had been discovered
again with most of them having similarly offset orbits but that's not the only
odd thing in the solar system. In fact there were several more unexplained
peculiarities, the first of these is obviously the orbits clustering of the TNO's,
then there was the fact that the orbits of these and some other objects
were out of a plane of a solar system by some way and some were even orbiting in
the opposite direction of the rest of the planets. Also it's an odd fact that
the plane of all the major planets is tilted about 6 degrees from the equator
of the Sun when you would expect it to be the same. But if we put a new large
but as yet undiscovered planet into the computer models these peculiarities can
be explained quite easily. Astronomers have nicknamed it Planet 9
and say it it will have a mass of around 10 times that of the earth and be
about four times larger. It would be on a very large elliptical orbit out of a
plane of the solar system taking about 20,000 years to complete one orbit. This
would also explain why we haven't yet found it we've been looking in the wrong
place and it could be up to 1,200 AU or 180 billion kilometres away at its
farthest distance. It's computer-simulated orbit would bring it
into about 200 AU or 30 billion kilometers at its closest approach still
well out from the orbit of Neptune and a very, very, very long way from the inner
solar system on earth. We've also recently been able to detect the solar
systems around other stars and the most common exoplanets found are ones which
match the size and mass of a missing planet 9 making our solar system look
rather odd as we don't appear to have one. Theories are that the missing Planet
9 is most likely to be an ice giant similar to Neptune that was thrown out
of the solar system's plane by Jupiter or Saturn or it could possibly be a
planet captured from another star in the sun's
birth cluster shortly after the formation of the solar system. Until it
is visually confirmed these will remain just theories but it would plug a lot of
holes in our current understanding of a solar system and reinstate a new planet
into Pluto's place. It also unfortunately gives plenty of ideas to the Nibiru
believers to conflate these pieces of information and come up with more wacko
end the world theories, so the quicker it is found the better it will be for
all of us. So thanks for watching and I just like to say that this episode sure
was the Orange Tribal Trip by madcap England is available from Atomretro.com
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