Hello all im one of those worriers and stuff. I see that planet X is was ment to hit us in 2003 and didnt. Well now its actually 2012 to coincide with the Mayans old calender about the world ending. Good old astronomers and stuff changing the dates to suit them i heard its hidden behind the Ort cloud is it? (the comets that circle the solar system??) so thats why we cant see it. Anyway could anyone look at this page http://www.howtosurvive2012.com/htm/world_02.htm and tell me what they think about this mans theroies about the sun and if you look he is also going on about a lot of other strange stuff. I just thought I would ask people on here as you all seem more into astronomy on a much better level then the doom mongers on the other sites.

From the linked site...

One has to "wonder" just how these ancients "knew a theory" that modern astronomers "don't know nothing of"??

You said it yourself, the people responsible for that site are doom mongers.

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One has also to wonder, how he knows about a theory only the Maya and Egyptians knew. If only they knew, but we don't, how does he know?

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This might be due to the fact that Planet X doesn't really exist!

As far as the information contained in the How To Survive 2012 site, be skeptical, very, very skeptical...it's chock full of pseudo-scientific nonsense!

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This claim is too nonsensical to waste a lot of time on, but it may be an interesting exercise to see if there could exist an elliptical orbit (the orbit cannot be parabolic or hyperbolic if 'Planet X' is making a repeat pass) that would have an object currently (2005) beyond the Oort Cloud but arrive at the inner solar system by only 2012.

I strongly suspect such an orbit is impossible.

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Heh. To call these people astronomers is an insult to astronomers...

I read of this woo-woo story in a post on IMDb. Someone was taking polls as to what would happen.

I suggested that NASA might have the CEV flying by that time.
Other than that, nothing at all will happen.

And of course Planet X exists! It's the tenth planet!

Now the question ought to be, does Planet XI exist?

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The Mayan Calendar does not "end" in 2012 any more than ours will end on December 31st; it simply rolls over. Claims assigned to this non-event are merely silly new-age bunk. You might find this informative.

sorry that i put good old astronomers i ment conspiracists. Anyway Thanks for the input. I dont know what these different orbits you were talking about are? Still I am keen to learn. Is it true what he says in the article though? That apparently stars like ours occasionally flare up like mad with explosions that would make the biggest of coronary mass ejections look tiny. Not that i suppose i can worry cos theres not much we can do about that. Still I wouldnt of thought we could detect that just yet on other stars.

Wikipedia can sometimes be a questionable source, but it'll do for now. The Oort Cloud description gives us a ballpark figure of at least a light-year for the distance to this hypothetical planet. So if this thing really did exist, and it's got just 7 years to reach the inner solar system, then it's not so much an orbit as a one-shot flyby, and very, very unlikely.

1/7th the speed of light is well into the realms of relativistic velocities, as well, so if these Mayans knew where it was then I'd like to see some other evidence that they knew about the speed of light and Special Relativity.

He obviously put some effort into that website, its fairly easy one the eye, but one would have to question why? Has he got a book coming out soon he's trying to sell?

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I thought elliptical orbits were for obects with less than an escape velocity vector and hyperbolic orbits were for objects with more than an escape velocity vector.

What are parabolic orbits? I thought that applied more to optics.

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If I set the budget, we'd have Ares and more. Unfortunately, I don't set the budget, and Ares is just too expensive and too far out for us to accomplish our goals within the budget we were given.

If we halt the ISS, all versions of Ares, and transport Orion and Altair aboard DIRECTv3's Jupiter family of Shuttle-Derived Launch Vehicles, we just might make it back to the Moon by 2020.

here is another site which deals on Nibiru the supposed planet X. Though the guy is clearly very evangelical in his ways and seems to try to mould the mayans (mulitiple gods) with book of revelations (one god who clearly states not to beleive in other faiths). Anyway it has a bad attempt at the science behind it on the left hand side down the page. Claiming last time nirburu passed it caused the earth to stop rotating. Correct me if im wrong but if it did that wouldnt there have been 1000mph winds and massive earthquakes with whole continents slipping into the sea? Anyway it may be hidden behind the Kuiper belt? im not sure now anyway. still id like to hear theroies on it. By the way from what I have read we cant actually see the orrt cloud and think it must be there. anywa here is that other link. http://www.satansrapture.com/nostra2012.htm im sure i found a much better one with far more science on it. im looking now for it.

We can't "see" the Kuiper belt or the Oort cloud because they are simply distributions of very widely scattered objects. You can't hide behind them any more than you can hide behind the solar system itself, or behind a constellation of stars. (We can see individual Kuiper belt objects, a few of them so far anyway.)

Look at it this way. Can you hide behind a row of parking meters if you are walking past them? No. Well, these "belts" and "clouds" are many orders of magnitude less dense than a row of parking meters.

The whole thing is utter nonsense. Don't worry about it; have you noticed the Mayans fretting about the end o' the world in 2012? Yes, the Mayans are still around.

What are parabolic orbits?

A parabolic orbit is one with zero hyperbolic excess speed. What that means, is, it's just barely an escape orbit, one where your speed relative to the attractive object goes to zero as you pull away. (Cue "Pretty Woman" by Ray Orbison).

Thanks very much for the info. Still to my original thought which is the link about apparently stars like ours have mini explosions (not coranary mass ejections) which can really mess things up. Anyone heard of that before? Apparently Solar scientists have recently observed this on other stars similar to our own.

Nothing was changed, this conspiracy has been around for quite a while (see Terrence McKenna and Timewave Zero). Supposedly the 2012 Mayan date coincides with the Sun crossing the ecliptic of the Milky Way, which will wreak havok upon the Earth. Havn't ever verified if we actually cross the galactic ecliptic on that date (almost every internet resource comes up with Mayan conspiracies, I bet some decent astro-software would tell me), but if it's true then that is perhaps proof that the Mayans knew quite a bit about astronomy, although the actual date 12/21/2012 has been disputed as a bad translation from the Mayan calendar.

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When the sun starts behaving like this, I'll start to worry:



I'll also owe one of my woo-woo friends a steak dinner, which I intend to provide on the evening of Jan 1, 2013.

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Whoa

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Clear skies Maksutov.

It appears only English-speaking people have anything to worry about...

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anyway just one last time? do stars like ours have mini explosions or not? Thats all I ask. Anybody know a Solar Scientist?

There's no evidence that our Sun has experienced any mini-explosions or massive flares. If it had, there would almost certainly be some sign of it in the geological record, and we haven't found any such signs.

Life has been around for a very long time -- nearly as long as the Earth has existed -- and hasn't been wiped out yet. So I think it's safe to stop worrying (about that, at least).

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I've looked around and cannot find anything on the sun having "mini-explosions" or huge flares that could reach Earth. Some white dwarf stars can go nova multiple times, and gamma-ray bursts from distant stars could have an impact on us, at least one researcher at the University of Kansas thinks that the Ordovician extinction may have been due to a gamma-ray burst.

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What's it like being a skeptic in the Middle East? Check out my blog.

You're just a tyro compared to this guy:



Check out those threads by doing an advanced search on User Name: bmpbmp and Find Threads Started By User. Now that's major league worrying!



At least be thankful you're not the CEO of North American Veeblefetzer!

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While it's true that our sun does have little tantrums now and then, they have so far (so far as we've recorded, at least) not had too many major effects on the surface of the planet (you'd probably get a different answer from someone who lives in Montreal, though ).

I highly recommend investing in the free program "SolScape", developed by the now-defunct software company Stimpsoft, formerly of http://www.stimpsoft.com and now available if you search for it in Google. It's a "solar data browser" that automatically retrieves data from the ACE, SOHO and a few other sun/earth-observing craft. Beautiful images result, and if you catch it at the right time you can see some spectacular CMEs every once in a while, then watch as the Earth's magnetic field goes all wonky a couple hours later. I've had the thing for years, and while the data has sometimes been worrying it's never led me to believe that the sun is going to blow up [/attempt to keep the post on topic]

The only massive threats that could harm us that would be hard to see would be large objects of shadow matter that may have some effect--but I think its gravity would be detected. Perhaps our space probes are being influenced by some kind of strange object. Doubtful, but...

http://physicsweb.org/articles/news/9/12/4/1

"They believe there may be, on average, one dark-matter ball for a volume of space about the size of our solar system (Phys. Rev. Lett. 95 231301)."

thanks to everyone for the imput to this discussion. you have all helped me understand space a lot better. Honestly my gratitude to you all.

You are always welcome to ask questions. That's what this board is for.

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"Who does not know anything, must believe everything."
Baroness Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach 1830-1916
our animal welfare board and organisation

There is only one thing special about the year 2012...

It's still far enough off to allow charlatans peddling these idiotic ideas to make a bundle of cash by selling alarmist books on this rubbish.

It's Y2K all over again and guess what. When 2013 finally rolls around, someone will find another doomsday year to start making money from.

When talking about solar flares, CME's etc, another thing tha should also be remembered just how vast our solar system is. We tend to keep a very anthropocentric view of things and when we see the sun shining down on us, it is easy to think that the sun is radiating it's energy directly at us.

Of course, the sun is radiating it's energy in all directions in a sphere around it, of which the Earth intercepts only the tiniest fraction. The scale of the solar system is difficult to comprehend, but if you can imagine shrinking the sun down so that it is the size of a basketball, then the Earth would be little bigger than a pinhead, and positioned about 100 feet away. Even though they can be big, it is a pretty good shot for any solar flares/CME, etc to hit us!

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"Certainly, in the topsy-turvy world of heavy rock, having a good solid piece of wood in your hand is often useful." - Ian Faith