Hi:

I'm new here, and I have a few answers to some of the posts.

First, I am one of the co-authors of the book titled above and featured in those 5 videos, so I know the other two authors very well.

In terms of our authoring duties, I did not work on the science. Jacco did that. I worked together with Marshall on other aspects of the book.

Peter B, I was particularly drawn to your letter with all the questions, so I will be quoting your entire question letter.

Beginning:

That was "US News and World Report." I saw copies of the news reports. The first was dated sometime in September, 1983.

Nibiru / Planet X is on a 3600-year tightly elliptical orbit that is roughly perpendicular to the ecliptic of the solar system. It is a planetary system of a brown dwarf and planets with a protoplanetary disk that resembles a very thick dust cloud. Check any astronomy book, and it will tell you that this is how planetary systems form around stars. We have one here. It's called the Oort Cloud.

No. The Greek philosopher Plato was the cause of the name given to Atlantis that we now know it by. Who knows what the people we call Atlanteans called themselves?

Mayan anthropologist George Erickson would be a good person to start with.

Let's not just look at only the heat of a brown dwarf. Stars also have magnetism, which gives them polarity. If an incoming brown dwarf has a polarity that is opposite to our own sun, that would cause the sun to react. Also, the brown dwarf would affect any planets it nears, and we would not be able to see it at a Pluto distance, for instance, without infrared, because of the protoplanetary disk.

Do the research. You'll find that all of our planets are suffering global warming.

It's not on a 4 - 5 thousand year orbital cycle. Its cycle is 36 to 37 hundred years. Also, the orbit is highly erratic, which indicates planets circling it and pulling on it with their own gravity.

It will seem to come out of nowhere, yes, when it comes up. That's because of the protoplanetary disk again. Have you ever driven at night in either pea-soup fog or a very nasty sandstorm? How about doing those things with your headlights off?

Picture (not two, but) at least twelve cars all driving around under those conditions. Now, try to accurately predict which of those twelve will escape without a scratch. It's not going to happen.

Brown dwarfs are brown because they don't generate enough heat to make them appear red or yellow. Added to that, there is the matter of (again) the protoplanetary disk, which is a cloud-like structure that holds heat in. So, again, detection without a far-infrared instrument will be next to impossible.

That's true -- or will be true for us by the time it gets here. The trick is not to wait to leave the tracks until the train is upon you, but to plan your exit when you first feel the rumble under your feet. Therefore, we need telescopes that look outside the visual spectrum.


Try Google. Google William Herschel, John Couch Adams and Clyde Tombaugh. They were neither NASA nor Russians, but they were looking for Planet X long before NASA, the Russian Space Agency, ESA, JAXA, etc., took up the mantle.

William Herschel noticed that Saturn was perturbed from its orbit and discovered Uranus. Adams did the same for Neptune, and Tombaugh discovered Pluto.

Now, before you rush to say, "There, that's proof that Planet X doesn't exist," here is what Dr. Brian Marsden of the Smithsonian Institution said: "If you fail to find something, it only means that you failed to find it. It doesn't mean that it's not there."

<snip>

Well, folks, let's belly up to the bar, and make Peter B our new best friend. He must have the bux (either US or Australian) to purchase one of these beauties in either the near- or far-infrared range! (Sorry, Pete -- couldn't resist that! )

Seriously, the SPT in Antartica that just went active in 2007 is a far-infrared telescope that will be able to do the search for us, and at the most optimal place.


Amateur astronomers are like those driving through the pea-soup fog at night without headlights. No, I am not calling them stupid, just unequipped. They can't tell about what they don't yet know, or as Dr. Marsden put it, "haven't yet found."

The jury is still out on that, but I hope you're right.

About the military, be all that you can be, JimH. I did, and I'm still alive and kickin'.

Again, 36 to 37 hundred years. Yes, it did leave a trace in a very early flyby. That's called the Asteroid Belt.

As for the planets, that's earlier in my letter.

Pete, I am having some real, good-natured fun with your letters. Here is your follow-up letter after having watched the videos. Really, it is nothing against you.

Maybe the person who started this thread didn't, but we did. According to the first video, after the press conference announcing the discovery of the space body at the edge of the solar system, NASA capped the topic. No more information came out -- that is, until they stated what you said. However, that took several months for them even to go that far.

Did you listen to the second video? In the second video, about 1/4 of the way through, Marshall Masters states that prevailing scientific thought about brown dwarfs is that they must be larger than Jupiter. He briefly again touches on the US News story, but stops short of saying that he believes that object to be Planet X, because the previous sentence indicates that he does not. However, read the next paragraph.

Planet X, with a protoplanetary disk around it, is not traveling light. It will bring many smaller objects with it, including one like the one spotted by IRAS.

Yes, it is a lot cooler than the sun, but inside the orbital sphere of Pluto, it is within the sun's gravitational field. It affects, and is affected by, the sun's gravity. That is making the sun go crazy, and the sun affects Coruscant -- no; Tattooine -- no; oh, yes, Earth and the other planets in our system. (Fans of Star Wars are well aware that Coruscant and Tattooine had enough problems of their own without Nibiru jumping into their $#!t.) Then, the global warming of the outer planets is affected by the heat of the brown dwarf, itself.

Ignore the five videos if you wish, research them if you wish (please!), or if you wish, take the videos at their word, for Marshall did suggest research at the end of the last video, too.

One more thing, Pete, you asked about The Kolbrin Bible. Here is its current website. http://yowbooks.com/html/kolbrin.html Yes, group, I also edited that book, as you will find near the bottom of the page.

The reason that it doesn't show up on Wiki is that people were putting erroneous entries onto its Wiki page, using their "public editing" system, and stating them as facts. I don't remember now what they were because this happened several years ago, but as editor, it was my responsibility to check them out. Marshall sent Wiki the facts and asked them to update the page. It was pulled, instead.

Such is life.

Thanks, Pete.

Now, on to STS60:

STS, since I already stated my position about the original post and Pete's answer, I will not restate it. It has not changed in the last 5 minutes, nor will it.

However, I do have a bone to pick about the ad-hominem attack you launched against Marshall and the other two co-authors of the book that the videos are about. You said, in response to another statement:

None of the three of us is delusional; one of us is a scientist, and I respectfully, but publicly request that the moderator edit that paragraph out of your letter. You don't know us, and you don't have a right to use a public forum to judge us in that manner. I didn't judge Pete, and though I may not agree with him, he is entitled to his opinion about the subject of Planet X, which is what this thread is about.

Now, to end this letter on a happier note, Bozola, your post had me rolling on the floor with laughter! That tells me you spent some time watching Hardware Wars. Keep the humor coming, guy!

Cheers,
Princess

http://www.earthage.org/EarthOldorYo...de%20flood.htm
This one is a Young Earth Creationist site chock full of misconceptions, bad evidence, heavily distorted evidence, severe cherry picking, outright falsehoods and unsubstantiated claims.

That's the Black Sea idea. Debatable, but, no world flood, and doesn't require a Nibiru.

A YEC site. Next.

Looks like Black Sea again.

There isn't any scientific evidence for how long humans have been on the planet? That's news to me.

__________________
I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?

Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

The Leif Ericson Cruiser

Van der Worp?

Would that be this guy?

Calculating the orbits of invisible planets and the explosive power of gas giants, adding an healthy dose of fear-mongering, must just be a hobby then.

Hasn't published a single peer-reviewed paper ever.

[/sarcasm]

__________________
Join the Illuminati

It sounds like you assume everything "the government" (who is that anyway) says must be a lie.

To follow that logic, the government must be lying when they claim suicide is bad. Please follow that logic and commit suicide.

Or wait, could it be that even the government CAN tell the truth?
How do you actually determine whether they tell lies or the truth?
Is it whether they agree with your theory or not?

A quick shufty on the IRAS claim on Planet X throws up some answers. Few facts and lots of claims. Or is it me?

After 2012 and when everything is still normal, what is the next disaster on the horizon?

Hi yourself, welcome to BAUT. You should look over the rules and the FAQs, particularly for the CT section.

I won't try to answer all of your post, but will pick a couple of points.


And if you read the BA's blog (linked above) you will find that when he spoke with the actual scientists (not NASA or the government), he found out that there initial reports on Planet X were speculation and that further research found that this IR objects were much further away (dust clouds in our galaxy or other galaxies).

But if there was a protoplanetary disk around it, this would be huge. Such disks are usually bigger than our solar system. We have easily observed them around distant stars. And such objects would reflect light from our on sun, and would be easily visible to backyard astronomers. It would also block distant stars behind in the sky. There is no way such an object would not be seen.

In spite of the name, brown dwarfs are still fairly bright objects, and that close to us would be visible. They have been detected out to hundreds of light years.

Most of all, an object that big, with a protoplanetary disk around it to boot, would cause gravitational effects that would been seen long ago. Yet, last I checked, every planet in our solar system is exactly where it is supposed to be.

__________________
At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

One Earth, One Sky - IYA 2009
All moderation in purple

By the way PrincessVader08, I just thought of one other thing.

You are claiming that this brown dwarf is on a 3600 year orbit and has a protoplanetary disk. I assume it has had this disk for a while, and that it didn't just get happen in the last orbit (such disks form with their star).

There is absolutely no way that such a disk could survive a trip through our solar system without being torn apart by gravitational forces, and would probably similar effect the planets in our solar system. It certainly could not have survived multiple trips every 3600 years.

__________________
At night the stars put on a show for free (Carole King)

One Earth, One Sky - IYA 2009
All moderation in purple

I would agree that the description "delusional ravings" is inappropriate in your case, at least, Princess. But "scientific illiteracy" is right on the money. Here's an example:

The perturbations in Saturn's orbit did indeed lead Herschel to discover Uranus, and Neptune was discovered by a similar technique. However, Tombaugh's discovery of Pluto was entirely fortuitous. The perturbations that led to his search were later shown to be invalid -- simple mismeasurements. What's more, Pluto is far too small to have caused them, even if they had been real. Tombaugh simply lucked out and discovered a large (and the first known) Kuiper Belt object.

In fact, as Swift mentioned, all the planets are just where they should be based on our present understanding of gravity (i.e. General Relativity) and the known masses in the solar system. There is absolutely no indication of any other large objects nearby, and this most definitely rules out anything like the brown dwarf you're describing.

The bottom line is that you seem to think the history of planetary discovery somehow supports your notion of the existence of this brown dwarf, or at least allows its possibility, when in fact it completely precludes it. I see that as scientific illiteracy, pure and simple.

__________________
Relight the Firefly!

"It is quite clear that Occam's razor does not sharpen in your pyramid." (Nicolas)

"Still, a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest." (Paul Simon)

Hello Ms Manning (I hope I have your name right – I thought it was a reasonably safe guess). Welcome to the BAUT forum.

Okay, but what about astronomical sources? Like other scientists, astronomers publish their findings in professional journals.

Okay, but how do you (collectively) know these details? Is there evidence, or are these things which need to be true in order for your theory to work? And I’ll come back to the Oort Cloud later.

At what sort of distance would the brown dwarf need to be for this interaction to happen? Can you provide some calculations?

But protoplanetary discs are flat, and would at best block light in one narrow plane. For your theory to be right, this disc needs to be aligned with the Earth. More than a couple of degrees out, and there won’t be any blockage. Is there any evidence to support this claim? Or is this something else which needs to be true in order for your theory to work?

And the Oort Cloud certainly doesn’t obscure our vision out of the Solar System, so it certainly wouldn’t block any outside view of our Sun. If Brownie’s protoplanetary disc is as thick as the Oort Cloud, it isn’t going to block our view of Brownie, regardless of the alignment of the disc’s plane.

Unfortunately, the evidence I’ve found suggests that only a couple of planets or moons are heating up, and in some cases the heating is localised within the planet. For other planets, I understand there’s no evidence of heating. Can you please tell me the source of your data about the planets heating?

Fair enough. I know of the 3600 year figure for Nibiru. But the OP talked about the Sumerians, whose civilisation flourished 4000-5000 years ago, and I assumed he meant Brownie last visited the Earth at that time.

How do you (collectively) know Brownie’s orbit is highly erratic, if you can’t see it?

Well, I’ve already suggested that the protoplanetary disc is unlikely to be thick enough to obscure Brownie.

Again, the disc is unlikely to have this effect. And anyway, the disc is going to reflect the Sun’s light, making it more visible.

Well, in my humble opinion they’re going to be hard pressed to miss Brownie.

This is a strangely negative self-assessment after the certainty you’ve displayed up to now.

But Brownie isn’t necessary to explain the Asteroid Belt. Jupiter alone is a sufficient explanation for the asteroids.

And anyway, if Brownie has been passing through the Solar System every 3600 years for the last 4.5-odd billion years, why does it still have a protoplanetary disc?

:-) @ Star Wars refs. But can you be a little more precise about Brownie’s presence making the Sun go crazy? At what sort of range does the effect arise, and what sort of effect is “crazy”?

You don't know us, and you don't have a right to use a public forum to judge us in that manner.

The act of publishing a book necessarily exposes one's ideas to the public, to be received in a manner in which the public deems appropriate. I don't know you either, but I've known Sts60 for many years. I have yet to find an instance where he has erred, and if he is wrong in judging the scientific strength of your findings, it would be a first.

Magnetism acting on the same order as gravity in planetary interactions is scientific hogwash.

Added to that, there is the matter of (again) the protoplanetary disk, which is a cloud-like structure that holds heat in.

More hogwash.

I will also endorse Swift's comment about the gravitational effect of a "protoplanetary disk" passing through the Solar System. He is entirely correct.

Many of the participants here are professionally qualified in such fields as astrodynamics and astrophysics. We are obviously not your intended audience.

__________________
"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base

Perhaps this thread could be renamed "Niburu -- Brown Dwarf, Destroyer of Brain Cells".

__________________
Microsoft is over if you want it.

The bar has been lowered for the promotion of ATM ideas; the bar for the acceptance of ATM ideas must remain high.

I did a guesstimate to see how close Niburu would have to be to get here in 5 years. Niburu is claimed to be in orbit around the Sun so when it does get here its speed has to be less than the escape velocity, which is sqrt(2) times the orbital velocity (for circular orbits), that is about 5AU/year. Even if I make the extremely generous assumption that it already has this speed it would have to be inside the orbit of Neptune. In reality it would be more like 10-15 AU, about the distance of Saturn.

If it was a brown dwarf we'd be talking about a naked eye object and the second or third brightest infrared object in the whole sky.

__________________
"The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity."

Dorothy Parker (?)

<sidetrack>Actually, Y2K wasn't "nonsense", it was a real problem that was, thankfully, solved by a lot of hard work from some very skilled and dedicated people. There were, in fact, some (mostly minor) problems in a few countries.

Even the worst-case scenario would not have been as bad as the Doomscreamers made it out. But it would have been bad, for a while.

</sidetrack>

__________________
"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
"The Mayan symbol for "book" looks a lot like a triple hamburger, but I've never seen them claiming it as proof the Mayans had Big Macs." - KaiYeves
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

Now, on to STS60:

STS, since I already stated my position about the original post and Pete's answer, I will not restate it. It has not changed in the last 5 minutes, nor will it.

Hello, PrincessVader08. Welcome to the forum.

However, I do have a bone to pick about the ad-hominem attack you launched against Marshall and the other two co-authors of the book that the videos are about. You said, in response to another statement:
...
None of the three of us is delusional; one of us is a scientist, and I respectfully, but publicly request that the moderator edit that paragraph out of your letter.

But the claims about your version of Planet X are, to put it gently, incompatible with physical reality. So far at odds with it, in fact, that they might be the "ravings" of the truly "delusional". That's not very polite, I admit, and I don't claim that you are "delusional" in your everyday life. I'm sure you and your friends are perfectly nice people with jobs, families, good personal hygiene, etc. I don't think you walk around mumbling to yourselves, or anything like that. So I'm sorry about that, and consider that phrase to be retracted, with apologies.

I believe the moderators will not change the posting, as it does not involve profanity. I won't delete it because it's already made, and I disapprove of revisionism after a post is established and discussed.

You say that one of you is a "scientist". One wonders what kind of scientist, and in what context, but being a scientist is no guarantee that one is making sense with any particular claim. In that regard, I stand by the characterization of "scientifically illiterate".

You don't know us, and you don't have a right to use a public forum to judge us in that manner. I didn't judge Pete, and though I may not agree with him, he is entitled to his opinion about the subject of Planet X, which is what this thread is about.

I'm judging the "Planet X" claims, which are open to public criticism, and frankly display a thorough ignorance of astronomy, astrophysics, and planetary science. I can't pretty that up in a way that pleases you: if you don't want your claims ridiculed, don't make ridiculous claims.

__________________
"Slapping a guy on the head is just as funny now as it was eighty years ago."

Uranus was not discovered by considering the perturbations of Saturn. William Herschel discovered it while hunting for comets. He initially thought it was a comet, but after a while noticed that it was moving slowly and no tail seemed to form.

Neptune was predicted by Adams and Leverrier, but if you examine their methods and their assumptions, you will find that they were off by quite a bit and they were both actually quite lucky to be about a degree off.

Numerous predictions were made for different "Planet X's" by Pickering and Lowell (and possibly others), none of which was even close to giving specific coordinates. Pluto was found by diligent searching, and had the search gone on I'm sure that 2060 Chiron (the first Centaur), other Centaurs, and Kuiper-belt objects would have been found sooner. (Indeed, 2060 Chiron was discovered in 1977 and searches of photographic plates revealed it had been picked up in 1969, 1943, 1941 and even 1895!)

Leverrier predicted orbits for an intramercurial planet called "Vulcan", none of which panned out.

Numerous predictions have been made for "Planet X" beyond Pluto, none of which panned out.

One is justified in saying, with the marginal exception of Neptune where coordinates were predicted, that no one has predicted the existence of a planet/asteroid/Kuiper belt object using its perturbations of another planet's orbit.

__________________
Microsoft is over if you want it.

The bar has been lowered for the promotion of ATM ideas; the bar for the acceptance of ATM ideas must remain high.

There are "Planet X"s like Sedna, but they are nothing like the "Planet X" referred to in the OP. They are simply Kuiper belt objects, and while interesting, have nothing whatsoever to do with the claims of the "Nibiru" crowd. None of them was known or written about by the Sumerians or any other ancient observers. None of them are brown dwarfs or other such silliness. To conflate the discovery and existence of such outer planet-like bodies with Nibiru/Planet X, and thus trumpet the astronomical community's observations as support for such an object, really is scientific illiteracy, if not outright misrepresentation.

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"Slapping a guy on the head is just as funny now as it was eighty years ago."

OK, Who put you in charge of defining true scholarship? I think perhaps you are influenced by all the internet era re-hashing of old Military Myths, and the perennial JFK/Ike out of context quotes.....

I was in the Military for 10 years, and I heard every story that is now popular on the net,there or earlier in Texas,in the 1950's on late night radio.....The only one that I did not hear of from these "unimpeachable sources",was this Nibaru baloney,that was in a movie made in the 50's, and has been previously hashed out here.

Remember something, which im my humble opinion is important, emotional arguments mean absolutely nothing, when dealing with the reality out side of our own little subjective world....No matter how convincing it sounds, if there is no objective information, then there is no real connection to the actual reality....

Just because some of the "whacamundos"have been right about one thing or another, does not prove anything. What Science is interested in is epistemology, not necessarily the theory itself.(ie: Brown Dwarfs returning as such...)

Dale

__________________
"Ad astra per aspera"

Um . . . you are aware that this doesn't actually make any sense, right? You've never heard of it, so it was a credible source?

No. Actually, I believe that the government is generally incompetent to keep major secrets for any great length of time, and the historical record generally backs me up about this one. Further, "the government" is a much wider category than I think most people think about. It isn't just your elected officials (blatant political endorsements are very against board rules, incidentally; did you not read them?) and the military. It's teachers, and my mom who works for the County of Los Angeles, and so forth. "The government" is made up of an awful lot of people; that, in my opinion, is why governmental secrecy eventually fails. People talk. Further, a lot of things the government is allegedly keeping secret could not be kept secret from professionals or even amateurs in the field.

Yeah. It's why Buzz Aldrin explains the so-called UFO that he saw on CNN, right?

Yes. Because "UFO" means unidentified flying object, not alien spacecraft. In short, you are using it incorrectly.

Trust me. The last place I'd go for credible sources is the Disclosure Project, and if you bothered looking beyond Wikipedia (like using the search function on this very site), you'd know why.

Oh, Gods. Argument by YouTube? Have you considered, you know, reading books about Sumerian culture? By reputable historians, maybe?

I consider myself a true scholar, actually, and you're wrong. I don't need to meld science, history, and religion, least of all religion. In my field, I need to be aware of religious influences on people, but I don't have to assume that their religious beliefs are correct. That's actually for either of my primary fields--I'm a scholar of literature and history. Those people around here--and there are a fair number of them--who are professional scientists really don't need to meld religion into anything. What they need is evidence, and they haven't seen any that convinces them. Since religion, by definition, is about faith, it's not about evidence.

Yes. It's very irritating, especially because, when you're presented with the evidence that you're wrong, you claim that we're saying what we are because we believe the government. That, in my opinion, is promoting a certain viewpoint, and yes, it does make you look like you don't know what you're talking about.

Wrong. In science, nothing is considered "proven right." There's only proven wrong, which the idea of a brown dwarf as described in your post is.

No, it isn't.

Yes. But that only serves to indicate that the Israelites cribbed the story from the Sumerians, with whom they had contact, not that it's true.

Yes, there is. Are you really this ignorant of science? Now, of course, it depends on how you define "human," but after you settled that, we have a very good idea of how long humans have existed, because there is quite a lot of scientific evidence for it.

__________________
Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Good point, Gillianren, but let me amplify it a bit: by reputable historians we do not mean Zacharia Sitchen, Erich von Danniken, etc.

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Microsoft is over if you want it.

The bar has been lowered for the promotion of ATM ideas; the bar for the acceptance of ATM ideas must remain high.

WOW> I thought this was an old, old thread someone dredged up, but it's dated yesterday.

There really is nothing new under the Sun, is there?

__________________
"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
"The Mayan symbol for "book" looks a lot like a triple hamburger, but I've never seen them claiming it as proof the Mayans had Big Macs." - KaiYeves
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

No they wouldn't, only a true nut job would try and meld science and mythology.

Science deals in testable circumstances and facts. Mythology deals in things that are completely untestable, and founded on beliefs, dreams or hallucinations.

By definition they are mutually exclusive.

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There is no problem that cannot be solved by a suitable application of high explosives - US Army Demolitions School

I just saw Hayley's comet, she waved, Said "why you always running in place? Even the man in the moon disappeared, Somewhere in the stratosphere" - Shinedown

http://worldsofothersuns.home.comcast.net/

Say, will the purveyors of "Planet X"/"Nibiru" books, videos, etc., offer refunds when there is no such catastrophe in 2012? Will they offer to help the credulous and uninformed who have left their homes and abandoned their affairs in vain anticipation of the promised transformational-event-that-wasn't?

One wonders if any of the people who have purveyed the Jupiter effect, the Rapture (pick any version), the Grand Alignment, Hale-Bopp spaceship (well, he's dead along with his victims, so that doesn't count), the Y2k disaster (the end-of-the-world version, not the real and manageable issues), the 2003 Nibiru encounter, and so on, have ever come out and actually helped any of the people who turned their lives upside down based on such apocalyptic prophecies and predictions. Heck, I wonder how many of them have so much as said "Sorry. I was wrong." (I can think of only one offhand: a Taiwanese group of Rapture-in-1990something believers - the leader of which called his own prediction "nonsense" after if failed.)

I will cheerfully and humbly admit my error and do my best to pick up the pieces if the Nibiru/Planet X claims turn out to be right in defiance of astronomy, physics, and history. What about you, Princess? What will you do when 2012 rolls by and nothing happens?

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"Slapping a guy on the head is just as funny now as it was eighty years ago."

I should have better explained: I meant the doomsday millenium madness not the software problems.

The Kupier belt and asteroid belt are possibly what is left of our Sun's protoplanitary disk. The Oort cloud is thought to be a sphere completely surrounding our sun at a distance of about 100 billion kilometers to about ten trillion kilometers = one light year. Both are trasparent = do not ocult distant stars, so I don't see how either could hide a brown dwarf or even a Neptune size body. We might not detect such a body if it is presently farther away than 100 billion kilometers. At that distace it would not reach the vicinity of the orbit of Neptune by 2012. If Nebarue is presently approching at 50,000 miles per hour, it will be 99 billion miles away in 20,000 hours = 833 days = 2.3 years. It will then be doing about 50,140 miles per hour. Using 50,000 miles per hour as the average speed for Nibiru and 3700 years as the length of the Nibiru year: 50,000 miles per hour is 1,200,000 miles per day = 438,000,000 miles per year times 3700 years = 1620 billion miles. That is a reasonable length for the orbit of Nibiru, but I think the 50,000 miles per hour is way high for the average speed. Thus I have to agree with the other posts: Nibiru and it's dust cloud should presently be reflecting enough sunlight to be easily visable by amature telescopes if it is going to pass closer than the orbit of Neptune in 2012. How about it arriving about 2222, instead of 2012? Neil

When the Mayan Calendar flips over (not ends!) and the Gregorian Calendar flips over to 2013, the 2012-ers will be gone. But the Nibiruids will keep on!

How sad.

__________________
Microsoft is over if you want it.

The bar has been lowered for the promotion of ATM ideas; the bar for the acceptance of ATM ideas must remain high.

Oh. I guess I didn't pay much attention to that stuff, so I wasn't really aware of it being that big a deal.

__________________
"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
"The Mayan symbol for "book" looks a lot like a triple hamburger, but I've never seen them claiming it as proof the Mayans had Big Macs." - KaiYeves
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

Oh, so that's when we're doomed.

__________________
"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
"The Mayan symbol for "book" looks a lot like a triple hamburger, but I've never seen them claiming it as proof the Mayans had Big Macs." - KaiYeves
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

...the 2012-ers will be gone.

You wish. Doomsayers always find a "mistake" in their calculations so that they can continue to make money for another five or ten years until the "real" end of the world will come.

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"Facts are stubborn things." --John Adams
Clavius Moon Base

Welcome to BAUT.

Shouldn't that be "Nibiru is claimed to be on a 3600-year tightly elliptical orbit . . ."? That is, for you to make such a bold statement, I would expect that you could provide direct evidence. Where is it?

The sun hasn't had a protoplanetary disk for billions of years. The Oort Cloud (a very loose collection of comets that has not been directly observed) is thought to be a remnant of the protoplanetary phase, and is not thought to be a disk. Some comets are considered evidence for it, but as you probably have seen, it does not obscure our view of objects outside the solar system. It is far too thin for that.

It does? What is the polarity of a bar magnet or an electromagnet?

I'm sorry, but that doesn't make sense. A star couldn't have opposite magnetic polarity.

That I agree with, and that is a strong argument against the idea that there is a brown dwarf in a 3600 year orbit that takes it well into the solar system: It would be hard to miss the effects of previous passes.

We wouldn't? Let's assume there is a thick dusty disk facing Earth edge on. What are the dimensions you're assuming? Perhaps, say, 50 million kilometers by 5-10 million kilometers, and thick enough to block visible light? We're regularly finding objects smaller than Pluto at Pluto's distance. This disk would be painfully obvious.

Actually, that's something you would be expected to support.

So, you've made direct observations? Either you have made direct observations (in which case, you could tell us where to look) or you don't understand how gravity works. The motions of the planets around the sun do cause the sun to "wobble" very slightly. However, a distant observer would be hard pressed to notice these wobbles (even for Jupiter) without very good instruments. Similarly, even if a brown dwarf had a nearby companion of the same mass, that would only cause them both to move about a common center. It would not change the overall path in the sky as viewed from Earth.

Yes, but that is poor analogy to the Earth. A better analogy would be looking at an individual cloud in a clear sky with the sun providing light.

See above, regarding the sun.


And there could be an invisible elf in my backyard, but that doesn't mean that people should give credence to any old claim. Anyway, I don't say "that proves X doesn't exist." It's not my burden of proof. It's yours, for providing credible evidence for your argument. So far, I have seen none.

I'm all ears. How does the asteroid belt provide evidence for this?

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I say there is an invisible elf in my backyard. How do you prove that I am wrong?

Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

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