Sinister Security: Nibiru

No, This Year's Solar Eclipse Won't Trigger a Nibiru Apocalypse

Read

The hype over the Great American Eclipse on 21 August is certainly reaching fever pitch now that we're less than ten days out, and we hope that you are already prepared. But where there's hype, there's also conspiracy theories. Like the one that's been gracing tabloid headlines all week - that this eclipse is the precursor of a collision with an imaginary planet called Nibiru.

For the uninitiated, the non-existent Nibiru (sometimes called Planet X) is a planet-sized object supposedly hurtling through space towards an inevitable smash into our own planet.

google_ad_client = "ca-pub-6829942583178391"; google_ad_slot = "8307931068"; google_ad_width = 300; google_ad_height = 250;

NASA already told the world back in 2012 that "Nibiru and other stories about wayward planets are an Internet hoax," but here we are again. So, what's going on?

“Astronomy-inspired apocalyptic conspiracy theories hitch their wagon to whatever is happening in astronomy this year. It's the eclipse now, a few years back it was a planetary alignment, and two decades ago conspiracy theorists were excited by Comet Hale-Bopp." Said astronomer Michael Brown from Monash University in Australia tells ScienceAlert.

Hale-Bopp was discovered in 1995 and quickly became one of the brightest comets observed in the 20th century. Its appearance sparked both apocalyptic and UFO theories, and tragically also triggered a mass suicide of 39 people in the Heaven's Gate cult. That comet's first appearance actually coincides with the origins of the whole Nibiru thing - the first time online newsgroups heard about this particular 'wayward planet' was from a woman called Nancy Lieder in 1995.

Except her cataclysmic prediction was actually slated for 2003. When nothing happened, the date got pushed to 2012, which some may recall as the year of another apocalypse bust, this time connected with the ancient Mayans.

“I do wonder if media interest in these stories is about mockery. Even some of the British tabloids frame this story as a conspiracy theory by a numerologist, whereas they sometimes pitch pseudoscience as the work of plucky self-trained experts.” says Brown, noting that since readers enjoy the ridiculousness of these theories, the tabloids rake in the clicks even if they don't actually believe in the content.

It's understandable that this year's eclipse, with its path of totality stretching across the entire United States, has caused such a stir in both scientific and pseudoscientific circles. With the technology we have, and with the crazy viewership numbers, it is likely to become the most documented solar eclipse humans have ever experienced.

“Images and data from potentially as many as millions of people will be collected and analysed by scientists for years to come.” Carrie Black from the US National Science Foundation said last month.

Should we be worried about Nibiru? Absolutely not. Should we be worried about media outlets and believers going into a frenzy over Nibiru? That's a more tricky line to toe, admits Brown.

“I doubt there's a clean demarcation between harmless nonsense and dangerous conspiracy theories. Fortunately many astronomy-related conspiracy theories fall into the harmless nonsense category, but there are occasional grim exceptions, like the Heaven's Gate cult.” he tells ScienceAlert.

Let's hope this year's eclipse will only bring harmless fun and fascinating science, and no grim conspiracy aftermath. In case you were wondering, the next total solar eclipses are going to be in 2019, 2020, 2021, and then again in 2024, the latter with a path of totality once again touching the United States.

We're calling it now - you can expect more Nibiru headlines then.

Scientists Say There is Yet another Unseen Planet at Solar System’s Edge

By 0x000216

Read

0 Comments

Astronomers say they’ve found hints that an unseen planetary-mass object may lurk in the outer reaches of our solar system. And no, they’re not talking about Planet Nine, Planet X, Nibiru or any of the other previously hypothesized worlds out there.

Kat Volk and Renu Malhotra of the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory say their analysis points to an eight-degree tilt in the average planes of orbits for the most distant objects in the Kuiper Belt, a ring of icy mini-worlds that lie beyond the orbit of Neptune.

google_ad_client = "ca-pub-6829942583178391"; google_ad_slot = "5254271864"; google_ad_width = 336; google_ad_height = 280;

“The most likely explanation for our results is that there is some unseen mass,” Volk said in a news release. “According to our calculations, something as massive as Mars would be needed to cause the warp that we measured.”

In a paper to be published by the Astronomical Journal, Volk and Malhotra say the gravitational influence of a Mars-size object at a distance of 60 astronomical units, or 60 AU, could explain the orbital warp. In comparison, Earth is 1 AU from the sun, and the Kuiper Belt extends from roughly 30 to 80 AU.

The warp was detected only for objects at distances from 50 to 80 AU, which fits the model proposed in the paper. Last year, a separate team of astronomers proposed the existence of a world they call Planet Nine, on the basis of a different type of analysis looking at distant objects with oddball orbits. That object would have to be farther out, coming no closer than about 200 AU.

Astronomers have been looking for Planet Nine ever since its existence was proposed but have not yet detected it. Volk and Malhotra say their mystery object (Planet Ten?) may have eluded detection if it lies in the galactic plane, which is so densely packed with stars that sky surveys could easily miss it.

“The chance that we have not found such an object of the right brightness and distance simply because of the limitations of the surveys is estimated to be about 30 percent,” Volk said.

It’s also possible that the warp was caused by a different phenomenon – for example, the gravitational disruption caused by a passing star.

“That would have required an extremely close passage at about 100 AU, and the warp would be erased within 10 million years, so we don’t consider this a likely scenario,” Malhotra said.

The next best opportunity to catch a glimpse of the mystery object should come with the completion of the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope in Chile. Scheduled for first light in 2020, that instrument will take unprecedented real-time surveys of the sky, night after night.

“We expect LSST to bring the number of observed KBOs from currently about 2,000 to 40,000,” Malhotra said. “There are a lot more KBOs out there — we just have not seen them yet. Some of them are too far and dim even for LSST to spot, but because the telescope will cover the sky much more comprehensively than current surveys, it should be able to detect this object, if it’s out there.”