I am posting this in Conspiracy Theories because of the claims made that no professional astronomers will listen.

I received the following e-mail at an account that is openly linkable from my website. (Yes, it attracts a fair amount of spam.) It alleges that there is a large planet observable, but the author of the e-mail has been unable to get any astronomers to look for it. A Google search on "Joseph Keller Barbarossa" did not turn up any interesting links.

I was wondering what the group here thought. Here is the e-mail.

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Observatorio de la Ballona

There is a "process" that must be followed when someone thinks they have discovered something. (you report it to the proper authorities, the discovery is confirmed, etc.)

Posting to Van Flandern's message board is not part of that process...

Color me skeptical...

I second that, particularly as he is trying to claim the existence of a body large enough to have been easily detected by now (particularly as unless its extremely old a brown dwarf would be glowing brightly in the infrared).

Honestly, I would point him to Phil's page:

http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/planetx/index.html

One of the things he discusses, in very understandable terms, are the observable and measurable effects that a planet that fit that description would have on our solar system. We do not observe those effects.

It wouldn't surprise anyone to find yet another KBO - but to see a Jupiter sized KBO in a 5 inch telescope?

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"I have this theory that the Apollo missions were faked when NASA found out that general relativity was wrong because the Earth was expanding due to the Sun's iron core being influenced by magnetic waves from the electric universe after being perturbed by Planet X and thereby causing global warming. Where should I start a thread about this?" ~ ToSeek

"Those are the people that wonder how a thermos knows whether to keep something hot or keep something cold." ~ NeoWatcher

Ian McDiarmid, one of the world's top cosmic ray researchers . . .

At first I thought this was a joke, because Ian McDiarmid is the name of the actor who played Emperor Palpatine in the Star Wars movies. In fact, there is a cosmic ray physicist by this name:

http://www.physics.uwo.ca/~drm/history/space/w_t3.html
(Scroll 3/4 of the way down this page.)

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"Transport of the mails, transport of the human voice, transport of flickering pictures - in this century, as in others, our highest accomplishments still have the single aim of bringing men together." St. Exupery

He wanted us to look, and would have looked himself, but only had access to his brother's 5 inch newtonian. That would be a challenge: Finding a magnitude 17 object with a 5-inch scope.

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Observatorio de la Ballona

Ah, misread that part. Thanks for clarifying that

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"I have this theory that the Apollo missions were faked when NASA found out that general relativity was wrong because the Earth was expanding due to the Sun's iron core being influenced by magnetic waves from the electric universe after being perturbed by Planet X and thereby causing global warming. Where should I start a thread about this?" ~ ToSeek

"Those are the people that wonder how a thermos knows whether to keep something hot or keep something cold." ~ NeoWatcher

I'm not sure this qualifies as a conspiracy theory, nor is it really a Planet X thread (in the impending crisis variety). Keller (if this is not a hoax) is talking about a large distant KBO that is no threat to life on Earth, and the only 'conspiracy' is that the few astronomers he's contacted about this haven't responded to this unlikely request.

Given that the reported object is quite a bit South of Leo, he does seem poorly informed to have asked someone in Iowa to take a look, though now that I think about it, preferring to post in TVF's forum as opposed to arXiv seems like a poorly informed choice too.

I think it belongs in the astronomy section. Any other opinions about this?

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Forming opinions as we speak

Since it's basically a request for observations to get confirmation, I'd say Astronomy, with a very outside chance of ATM (Jupiter size KBO?). Unless the thinking is that no one has yet responded because "we have 8 planets now and we're gonna keep it that way".

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A Nerd can figure out how long it will take the original Enterprise traveling at warp 6.5 to travel from Regulus to Antares.
A Geek will think he can use that to pick up a girl in a bar.
A Dork knows he can't pick up the girl with it, but will hang around for hours anyway, just in case she asks.
She might. You never know.

Astronomy, agreed. Reading over the post again, the only conspiracy is that it takes astronomers several days to answer email at their public adresses. It's likely to get the attention it needs in the Astronomy section.

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"I have this theory that the Apollo missions were faked when NASA found out that general relativity was wrong because the Earth was expanding due to the Sun's iron core being influenced by magnetic waves from the electric universe after being perturbed by Planet X and thereby causing global warming. Where should I start a thread about this?" ~ ToSeek

"Those are the people that wonder how a thermos knows whether to keep something hot or keep something cold." ~ NeoWatcher

By means of high-precision timing thanks to pulsars astronomers Nadia Zakamska, Scott Tremaine now know what the solar barycentre is doing with respect to the rest of the cosmos.
And it is not being pulled around by Planet X.

The astronomers, Nadia Zakamska, Scott Tremaine, made use of the Australia Telescope National Facility pulsar database ( http://www.atnf.csiro.au/research/pulsar/psrcat/ )

Title; Constraints on the acceleration of the solar system from high-precision timing
Authors: Nadia L. Zakamska, Scott Tremaine (Princeton University)

Many astronomers have speculated that the solar system contains undiscovered massive planets or a distant stellar companion.
The acceleration of the solar system barycentre can constrain the mass and position of the putative companion. In this paper we use the most recent timing data on accurate astronomical clocks (millisecond pulsars, pulsars in binary systems and pulsating white dwarfs) to constrain this acceleration.
No evidence for non-zero acceleration has been found; the typical sensitivity achieved by our method is a/c=a few times 10^-19 s^-1, comparable to the acceleration due to a Jupiter-mass planet at 200 AU.
The acceleration method is limited by the uncertainties in the distances and by the timing precision for pulsars in binary systems, and by the intrinsic distribution of the period derivatives for millisecond pulsars.
Timing data provide stronger constraints than residuals in the motions of comets or planets if the distance to the companion exceeds a few hundred AU.
The acceleration method is also more sensitive to the presence of a distant companion (closer than 300-400 AU) than existing optical and infrared surveys. We outline the differences between the effects of the peculiar acceleration of the solar system and the background of gravitational waves on high-precision timing.

http://au.arxiv.org/PS_cache/astro-p...06/0506548.pdf

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`Irony` actually does mean `metal like`...

I concur -- Astronomy does make sense.

I put it in Conspiracy Theories because I received it as an unsolicited e-mail, which is even a stranger way to report it than to post it to a forum.

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Observatorio de la Ballona

May I make a suggestion? You have access to more than your brother's 5 inch telescope. Many universities have observatories that have large telescopes. They often hold public nights. I am one of the volunteer observatory operators at San Francisco State University. If you showed up on a clear Monday night with your RA and DEC, I'd be happy to point the 16 incher your way. But SF is a 6 hour drive from you. And you'll be facing a 50% chance of being clouded out too. However, I imagine that there are observatories in the LA area that have public nights as well. Just check with the local universities. Also, you could attend star parties. Someone will bring 18 inch dob.

Just a question...

Assuming that (sooner or later) someone gets around to looking through a proper instrument at the supposed coordinates, and sees nothing, will this thread be moved back to the CT (or perhaps ATM) section??

Placing this in astronomy is, IMO, really giving it a "legitimacy" it does not deserve...at least not until evidence aquired through observation is presented.

But Andy got this as an unsolicited E mail and is only passing along the request for verification, not asserting the existence of it. I don't see anything that would call for an ATM or CT unless observations show nothing, but the claims persist.

I see this as being only slightly different than if someone were to come here asking if what they saw in their scope was a new comet. If the comet they think they found turns out to be M13, it's not a conspiracy, it's a mistake.

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A Nerd can figure out how long it will take the original Enterprise traveling at warp 6.5 to travel from Regulus to Antares.
A Geek will think he can use that to pick up a girl in a bar.
A Dork knows he can't pick up the girl with it, but will hang around for hours anyway, just in case she asks.
She might. You never know.

Perhaps if it weren't for the TVF "factor", I would feel differently.

However, IMO, if someone is so "confused" that they think that taking their planetary discovery to Van Flandern is a reasonable idea, then I must seriously question everything else they have said.

(Can you tell that I'm not a "fan" of Tom Van Flandern??? :LOL: )

I got curious about Joe Keller, so I went to Van Flandern's message board to read the original post by him.

Turns out that he is no stranger to the TVF board, having posted there more than 200 times...

Anyone care to take a guess as to how "mainstream" Mr. Keller's ideas are??

I would guess that they are not very maintream, and fairly naive about the scientific method... this is based on his seeming methodology for getting his idea published, and the fact that he's already named his 'planet'. None-the-less, this was neither an ATM post (Who would defend whatever there was to defend? Who would bother to look and dispute it?), nor was it a conspiracy theory.

Similarly, we have several very regular members who support some ATM viewpoints, but who do post reasonable and new things in our mainstream sections from time to time. Just because they are strongly motivated by observations that can suggest that the world is very different than most scientists think doesn't mean that everything they post is wrong. So Joe Keller's thing doesn't get tossed out.

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Forming opinions as we speak