In four days, Nibiru will strike the Earth, raining destruction upon us all. September 23, 2017 to be precise. At least according to a YouTube video with nearly 3 million views. Of course, that’s crazy. There is no Nibiru, and nothing remotely planet sized has any chance of striking Earth. But that hasn’t stopped people from sending astronomers emails, or calling local science centers to ask about the apocalypse. Even when we assure them there’s no risk, or explain how we know Nibiru doesn’t exist, they still have doubts. We’re probably lying, or haven’t looked at the “real” evidence. 

It’s the same pattern for other topics. The Earth is flat, vaccines are dangerous, the Sun is electric, climate change is a hoax. In every case, there is a wealth of scientific evidence to disprove these claims. In every case, supporters point to the “real” evidence, and claim that scientists are ignorant of the facts, or intentionally lying. The loudest skeptics of climate change use the same type of arguments as the loudest skeptics of a round Earth.

It’s deeply troubling, because it means there is no longer a common basis of scientific knowledge. The number of people who think the Earth is flat is rising. People who think vaccines are poison are digging in their heels, and the majority party of the United States claims that global warming is a lie. The facts don’t matter. The more evidence you present, the more entrenched the skeptics become.

I wish I had a solution, but I don’t. I only know that I used to be amused by emails claiming Nibiru is going to kill us or the Earth is flat. I’m not amused any more. It is a sign that our society is becoming increasingly detached from the wealth of hard won knowledge. Knowledge we have spent centuries gathering and testing. Knowledge that has made us healthier, wealthier and more peaceful. If we walk away from that, we will have a world of famine, ignorance, and a harsher life for our descendants.

I don’t want that future for humanity. I suspect skeptics of climate change or a flat Earth don’t want that either. But until we can find common ground, it is the future that awaits us.

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I get a lot of email from folks with pseudoscience claims. It could be that the Earth is actually flat, or that the Sun is powered by electricity, or that Einstein was wrong about gravity. Bonus points if the email also calls me an idiot or part of the astronomical illuminati. But in the world of pseudoscience another popular approach is to make a claim based upon some image. There’s no referenced source or clear history of the image, just a picture and a claim. But even for pseudoscience, this is just being lazy, because in the information age images can often be tracked to their source with minimal effort.

Hmmm. What could it be?

Let’s look at an example. Here’s an image I got in the mail this week. It looks like some strange winged planet or star, and it is claimed this is an image of Nibiru. Depending on who you listen to, Nibiru is red dwarf near the Sun, or a hidden planet in the outer solar system, or the Sun’s stellar companion. The only thing Nibiru folks seem to agree upon is that it’s heading our way and could kill us all. If you do a quick Google image search, sure enough you find several YouTube videos and blog posts claiming it’s an image of Nibiru. None of them give any source to the image, so no joy there.

But there are a few things we can tell from the image right off the bat. The first that it’s in color, so it’s probably a composite false-color image. In astronomy we don’t take color images, we take black and white images at specific wavelength ranges. If we want a color image, we have to combine images taken at different wavelengths to create a color image. Sometimes this is done with the goal of making the image as true to life as possible, but often we create “false color” images to make certain features more prominent. We do this because we want to capture as much light as possible, and color digital cameras aren’t very good at that. There is also some text written on the side:

IRIS 1473:3 (NI2b) 2003UB313
21.10.2003

The object as seen in Google Sky. Credit: DSS Consortium, SDSS, NASA/ESA, as screencapped from Google Sky.

It all looks official and government like, but was probably added to the image, since raw images aren’t stamped on the image. They are usually FITS files that have the timestamp and such as metadata. IRIS is the name of a solar satellite, the Interface Region Imaging Spectrograph. But it wasn’t even launched until June of 2013. 2003UB313 is the designation for the dwarf planet Eris, and NI2b might refer to nickel boride. It’s hard to say. IRIS couldn’t have taken an image in 2003, and Eris doesn’t remotely look like this. But going through the Google Image links, I came across a reference noting that the object could be seen in Google Sky, at Right Ascension 5h 42m 21.0s, and Declination 22° 36′ 45.7.  Sure enough, if you look up that location, you find a similar object. Now we’re getting somewhere.

Our mystery object as captured by the POSS I. Credit: STScI Digitized Sky Survey

As an interesting side note, several of the Nibiru posts talk about a conspiracy where Google blocked out that section of Google Sky when people found it, presumably to hide Nibiru from the general public. But Google is very clear about its sources. They give credit to the DSS Consortium, SDSS and NASA/ESA. The DSS Consortium is a Digitized Sky Survey that has digitized photographic plates from early sky surveys, most significantly the Palomar Observatory Sky Survey (POSS). The initial sky survey (POSS I) was done in 1958. A second, higher resolution survey (POSS II) was done in the 1980s and 1990s. These have been digitized and are freely available to the general public. Pick what part of the sky you want to see, and you can get the actual images. The only catch is that the site wants locations in decimal degrees rather than the old school hours, minutes, seconds. I could convert it by hand, but why not let an online converter do the heavy lifting. Bada bing, bada boom, and we have RA: 85.5875, DEC: 22.6125. Plug these into the online DSS archive, and we have our images. By default the site gives you the raw FITS files, which is what astronomers use, but it will also give you a GIF if you like. The resolution is pretty low, but it does confirm that this is the object in question.

Left: DSS color composite. Middle: 2MASS composite. Right: WISE composite. Credit: ADS All Sky Survey

The nice thing about sky surveys is that they are still doing them, and most of the data is publicly available. So why not look up the object in other surveys? One good resource is the ADS All Sky Survey, which has data from several sources. The nice thing about this particular site is that once you find your object, you can select images from several sky surveys. The image above shows three of them. The one on the left uses the DSS data we found before to create a “real color” image. The middle image uses data from the Two Micron All-Sky Survey (2MASS), which focuses on infrared wavelengths close to the visible spectrum. The image on the right is from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), which looks at longer infrared wavelengths.

It’s pretty clear that this object is bright in the infrared as well as the visible, and that the odd wing features are most apparent at visible wavelengths. This is a common characteristic of T Tauri type stars. These are young stars still in the process of forming. Unlike our Sun, which generates its heat from nuclear fusion, T Tauri stars are generating heat through their own gravitational weight. They tend to be brighter and warmer than main sequence stars of a similar mass, and they also tend to be near other gas and dust. The light from the star often reflects off this dust, creating bright reflection nebulae. This would explain the wing-like feature near the star.

Just to be sure, we can look up the object on an astronomical database known as SIMBAD (the Set of Identifications, Measurements, and Bibliography for Astronomical Data). If it is a known object, it will likely be listed there. Entering in the RA and Dec we got from the Nibiru fans, it looks like SIMBAD finds 2 objects: GN 05.39.2, which is a reflection nebula, 2MASS J05422123+2236471, which is a T Tauri type star. It has an apparent magnitude of about 12, and is probably about 700 to 1,000 light years away. We’ll know its exact distance when the Gaia spacecraft starts releasing its data. At magnitude 12, it can even be seen with a small telescope in dark rural skies. Amateur astronomer Scott Ferguson has not only done this, he’s made videos showing his work.

One of the most amazing things about astronomy is how accessible the data is. Most of the data from large telescopes and sky surveys are publicly available for free. Any site who posts an image like the one sent to me without providing sources is simply being lazy. Science isn’t about being lazy, it’s about getting things right, and that’s one of the reasons citations are always needed.

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In the 1800s observations of the planet Uranus had some interesting irregularities. When compared against the predicted motion of Uranus due to the Sun and other planets, the actual motion didn’t quite match. This led some astronomers to suspect that there was another planet beyond Uranus. In 1846 Neptune was discovered close to its predicted position. Now a new paper in the Astronomical Journal, points to similar evidence that a large planet may lurk in our outer solar system. 

The evidence comes from the behavior of the outermost known solar system bodies (the six with an average distance greater than 250 AU). These bodies are so distant from the Sun that we can’t measure their gravitational deviation directly. We just haven’t observed their orbits well enough. So instead the authors of this new work looked at the statistical characteristics of the bodies.

The orbital shapes of distant bodies (red) compared with closer bodies. Credit: Batygin and Brown.

If one assumes the orbits of outer solar system bodies are Keplerian (which is a reasonable assumption) then you can plot them in terms of their orientation. Most of the outer solar system bodies are distributed fairly randomly, but the most distant ones are clustered. Their orbits seemed to be clumped together in a way that you wouldn’t otherwise expect. The authors calculate the likelihood of this happening purely by chance is about 0.007%. In scientific terms that’s not quite unusual enough to be conclusive, but it does strongly hint at either a bias in the way these outer bodies are discovered or a mechanism that has caused them to cluster.

The authors contend that a good explanation for the clustering is a gravitational perturbation by a Neptune-mass planet further away and on the other side of the solar system. While it’s certainly a good explanation for the clustering of these outer bodies, that doesn’t guarantee there’s a large world out there. There are other possible explanations that could account for the effect. But it is worth looking into, and that’s exactly what’s planned. If there is a planet out there, then infrared sky surveys such as NEOWISE have a chance of finding it.

Paper: Konstantin Batygin and Michael E. Brown. Evidence for a Distant Giant Planet in the Solar System. The Astronomical Journal, Volume 151, Number 2 (2016)

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While doing a bit of background research on the Kozai mechanism for yesterday’s post, I kept running into mention of a mysterious object known as Nibiru. The Kozai mechanism is pretty esoteric, so seeing it mentioned in blog articles is a bit odd. Being curious, I followed the internet trail of Nibiru, and down the rabbit hole of the weird.

If you’re a Star Trek fan you might be familiar with Nibiru as the planet from the opening scene of the latest movie, but this Nibiru is supposed to be a planet heading for a collision course with Earth in the near future. The evidence for Nibiru comes from one Nancy Leider, who claimed to have gotten the information from gray aliens from Zeta Reticuli who communicate with her via a chip they implanted in her brain.

From the Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), an image of what some claim is Nibiru. It is actually Venus.

Since Nibiru is a term in Babylonian astronomy meaning the highest point of a star or planet in the sky, the mention of Nibiru in texts such as the Enuma Elis have been taken as evidence that the ancients knew of this planet. Most significantly, Zecharia Sitchin promotes the idea in his book The Twelfth Planet. This isn’t some self-published book. It was published by Harper in 1976 by HarperCollins, is still in press, and is ranked 51 on Amazon’s Astronomy and Space Science category. (Good golly I need to write a popular science book).

So what scientific evidence might support this claim? Absolutely none. The claim is, in fact, provably wrong. If an Earth-mass or larger object were approaching Earth, we would have detected it by now. We have, for example, made several all-sky surveys, including infrared surveys. Not to mention the army of amateur astronomers looking for comets and the like. Even if Nibiru were in a very elliptical orbit, we would have found it by now given its supposed size. There is no planet on a collision course with Earth.

And yet this idea won’t die.

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