For those who say there is no planet x:


http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/1874

http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Japanese_scientists_eye_new_planet_999.html

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/02/28/planet-solar-system.html

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"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind." - Dr. Seuss

. . . http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2005/29jul_planetx.htm

NOTE that NASA labeled the 10th Planet: 'planetx' in THEIR header . . .

They were just being cute.
Eris has never been referred to as "Planet X" in anything other than popular literature, and "Planet X" certainly means something entirely different to most laypersons who are familiar with the term.

For those who say there is no planet x:


http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/node/1874

http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Japanese_scientists_eye_new_planet_999.html

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/2008/02/28/planet-solar-system.html

One particular group of scientists at one particular Japanese university believe a terrestrial planet up to 2/3 the mass of Earth will be discovered beyond Pluto; they may be absolutely right.

...but that's not "Planet X", despite what they've chosen to call it.

The term "Planet X" in popular culture usually refers to this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_x

"It was postulated to explain apparent discrepancies in the orbits of the gas giants, especially those of Uranus and Neptune. Those discrepancies were resolved by measurements made in the 1980s.[1]

The "X" in the name represents an unknown and is pronounced as the letter, as opposed to the Roman numeral for ten. At the time of its conception there were eight known planets in the solar system; it was accordingly counted as a "ninth planet" in its initial decades, and then as a "tenth planet" from 1930 until the theory's demise in the early 1990s, and it is now generally accepted in the astronomical community that Planet X, as originally envisioned, doesn't exist."

... Myles Standish used data from Voyager 2's 1989 flyby of Neptune, which had revised the planet's total mass downward by 0.5 percent, to recalculate its gravitational effect on Uranus.[15] When the newly determined mass was used in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory Developmental Ephemeris (JPL DE), the supposed discrepancies in its orbit vanished.[1]

Also, to date there are no discrepancies in the trajectories of any space probes (Pioneer 10, Pioneer 11, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2) that can be attributed to the gravitational pull of a large undiscovered object in the outer solar system.[16]

Today the overwhelming consensus among astronomers is that Planet X, as Lowell defined it, does not exist."

This specific "Planet X", which would be a gas giant, and which many believe to exist due to the mistaken and erroneous belief that there is STILL a discrepancy in the orbits of Uranus and Neptune, has been made very popular among certain circles of conspiracy theorists and UFO enthusiasts due to websites like this one:
http://www.xplanetx.com/whatsnew.html

Or this one:
http://www.planetxvideo.com/

Some of these people also believe that Planet X is somehow related to the end of the world in 2012 (which itself is based on another erroneous belief that the Mayan calendar predicts the end of the world in 2012; in fact it was only projected to end a period of time in 2012; there are Mayan writings the reference events, such as the annual worship of Mayan kings, beyond 2012).

THAT Planet X, the one that the girl in the YouTube video claims "can only be seen from the South Pole" doesn't exist and nobody in the scientific community thinks it does.

Taurus, besides a fleeting reference in the movie K-PAX, I've never heard anyone suggest the things you're claiming they do. Tell me, have you met some "Flat Earthers," too? No, you say? Oh, well then. Please, don't make assumptions about everyone here based on a very limited number of them.

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Capitalize on this good fortune, one word can bring you round ... changes.

I think they were being cute. Or at least "tongue-in-cheek".

The term "Planet X" was coined by Percival Lowell not Clyde Tombaugh.
Tombaugh was looking for the specific "Planet X" (the gas giant inferred to exist due to the supposed discrepancies in the orbits of Uranus and Neptune) that Lowell predicted would be discovered.

Tombaugh believed, as Lowell had predicted, that Planet X would be found in almost the same spot where Pluto was eventually found.

"Today the overwhelming consensus among astronomers is that Planet X, as Lowell defined it, does not exist. Lowell had made a prediction of Planet X's position in 1915 that was fairly close to Pluto's actual position at that time; however, Ernest W. Brown concluded almost immediately that this was a coincidence, a view still held today."

Taurus, besides a fleeting reference in the movie K-PAX, I've never heard anyone suggest the things you're claiming they do. Tell me, have you met some "Flat Earthers," too? No, you say? Oh, well then. Please, don't make assumptions about everyone here based on a very limited number of them.

I'm sorry, but get ready for a shock then.

The girl in the YouTube video is specifically referring to the same Planet X I posted about. Reference is made by the poster of the video to "Nibiru" which is believed in psuedo-science circles to be the ancient Sumerian name of "Planet X", an alien world inhabited by extraterrestrials which will collide with the Earth in 2012.

Read through the comments section of the video and you will see that the belief in this specific version of "Planet X" is nearly unanimous among the commenters there (the one supposedly revealed by Sumerian texts, believed to be inhabited by aliens, and believed to be related to the supposed apocalypse in 2012).


Belief in this specific version of Planet X is fairly common among young internet users who have at least passing knowledge of it. You don't have to take my word for it; spend a few minutes searching online and you'll find a wealth of websites, discussion forums, and youtube videos concerning this "Planet X". It's arguably one of the most popular psuedo-science phenomenons at the moment.

Nibiru is actually referred to in the oldest known documents known to man,

These are the Sumerian tablets. Cuneiform tables.

Sitchin and others point this out in a simple reading of the tablets. Nibiru, Tiamat, 2012, Revelations have all been clumped together with the Mayan calendar to form a funky kind of mixture predicting the end of the world. Kind of the same way the Christian church assimilated Pagan holidays.

In any case...

Planet-X, or what ever you want to call it, has been predicted just recently to exist. The links I posted below show the scientists reasoning. It is basically agreed upon that the paths of the outer planets in our solar system are being affected by another body at the outer edge of our solar system.

See below for links.

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"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind." - Dr. Seuss

Good Lord. Do we need a lesson in statistics in here, next?

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Capitalize on this good fortune, one word can bring you round ... changes.

How ya doin Sarge?

:)

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"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind." - Dr. Seuss

Sitchin and others point this out in a simple reading of the tablets. Nibiru, Tiamat, 2012, Revelations have all been clumped together with the Mayan calendar to form a funky kind of mixture predicting the end of the world.

---> End Times <---

That's an awful lot of 'coincidences'... I guess we'll find out around 12.21.2012... ;)

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It may not be 1984 but George Orwell sure did see the future . . .

I admit I have no idea what it all means but if it is the end then there's not much to be done about it.

I mostly fear people using this time to manufacture a world war using all of the above as an excuse for it. God knows the entire western world is practically praying for apocalypse.

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"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind." - Dr. Seuss

Hey all,

Did I miss much? Had to go to work tonight..

Was the media teleconference any good? or was it nothing to do with planet X but instead about a supernova as mentioned in the thread?

some think there is a conspiracy to turn people into sheeple using religion.

That's not a conspiracy, that's evangelism... ;)

And therefore Planet X was discovered.

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me@rescam.org

And you are assuming that I'm not an academic? Try again, bunky.

Bunky?
Look, I know someone else that tried to make similar claims is not in academia, so my previous post was quite justified.

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Capitalize on this good fortune, one word can bring you round ... changes.

Interesting stuff

point of order:

I believe that we now know that there are other "planets" like Pluto out there that are actually bigger than Pluto. This is part of the events that decommissioned Pluto as a planet.

Another type of hype in this Genre is the existence of "Nemesis". Thought to be a brown dwarf star orbiting way out there beyond the Oort Cloud. I would think that the trillions of comets said to be in the outer fringes of our Solar system would have some effect on the outermost "planets" as well.

The more precise (and accurate) our measurements become the more info and maybe puzzlement we will have about our corner of the universe.

Daddio

Very possible, William Rothamel.

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"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind." - Dr. Seuss

Yes, there are some dwarf planets beyond Neptune ((Quaoar, Sedna, Eris, and of course Pluto comes to mind), however NASA determined via various satellites, space probes and ground-based telescopes (radio and optical) that there is no gas giant 2/3 the size of earth beyond Pluto's orbit which has an orbit that will intersect earth's (such as the different wacko/loony websites linked above suggest).

If there was such an object, we would see it's gravitational effects on the planets. Concider that our solar system is billions of years old, so-called 'Planet X' would have looped through the Solar System in it's orbit more than one time. Each time it would have plunged into the solar system, it would have to contend with the other planets (namely Saturn and Jupiter) however we see no changes in any of their orbits or any indications that their orbits have been affected.

Noting that, I can say that the Kuiper cliff is an interesting idea, though it would take data from the Pan-STARRS survey project and New Horizons space-probe before we could jump to the conclusion there is an earth or mars sized planet in the Kuiper region. (However if there were, it doesn't have an orbit beyond the elliptical...otherwise there wouldn't be a Kuiper cliff..)

Another quick thought is the girl in the video clearly has little to no knowledge of our solar system. No planet is only visible on one or the other hemisphere. Not only does the angle of our planet and it's rotation do away with her notion (please...a planet only viewable from the South Pole? Polaris, the North Star, is only 1 degree from the NCP, yet everyone on the Northern Hemisphere can see it...so any planet viewable from the South Pole is visible to anyone in the Southern Hemisphere) all known planets are within 8 degrees of the Ecliptic (well, 17 degrees if you include Pluto). Given that, we can pretty much put her down as a silly girl that has no idea on the subject of which she speaks. You just have to read her comments to see that...she doesn't even know the difference between the Solar System, our Galaxy or the Universe itself.

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Well said, Brian.

http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/080618-planet-x.html

;)

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'Planet X' May Lurk . . .

;)

btw - Thanks for the Post (Recent too)

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BOINC Wiki . . .

Science Status Page . . .

Quoting Daddio for Dr. C.E.T.I.

Interesting stuff

point of order:

I believe that we now know that there are other "planets" like Pluto out there that are actually bigger than Pluto. This is part of the events that decommissioned Pluto as a planet.

Another type of hype in this Genre is the existence of "Nemesis". Thought to be a brown dwarf star orbiting way out there beyond the Oort Cloud. I would think that the trillions of comets said to be in the outer fringes of our Solar system would have some effect on the outermost "planets" as well.

The more precise (and accurate) our measurements become the more info and maybe puzzlement we will have about our corner of the universe.

Daddio

http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2005/29jul_planetx.htm

10th Planet Discovered

Astronomers have found a new planet in the outer reaches of the solar system.


July 29, 2005: "It's definitely bigger than Pluto." So says Dr. Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology who announced today the discovery of a new planet in the outer solar system.

The planet, which hasn't been officially named yet, was found by Brown and colleagues using the Samuel Oschin Telescope at Palomar Observatory near San Diego. It is currently about 97 times farther from the sun than Earth, or 97 Astronomical Units (AU). For comparison, Pluto is 40 AU from the sun.

This places the new planet more or less in the Kuiper Belt, a dark realm beyond Neptune where thousands of small icy bodies orbit the sun. The planet appears to be typical of Kuiper Belt objects--only much bigger. Its sheer size in relation to the nine known planets means that it can only be classified as a planet itself, Brown says.

Backyard astronomers with large telescopes can see the new planet. But don't expect to be impressed: It looks like a dim speck of light, visual magnitude 19, moving very slowly against the starry background. "It is currently almost directly overhead in the early-morning eastern sky in the constellation Cetus," notes Brown.

The planet was discovered by, in addition to Brown, Chad Trujillo, of the Gemini Observatory in Mauna Kea, Hawaii, and David Rabinowitz, of Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut. They first photographed the new planet with the 48-inch Samuel Oschin Telescope on October 31, 2003. The object was so far away, however, that its motion was not detected until they reanalyzed the data in January of this year. In the last seven months, the scientists have been studying the planet to better estimate its size and its motions.

"We are 100 percent confident that this is the first object bigger than Pluto ever found in the outer solar system," Brown adds.

Telescopes have not yet revealed the planet's disk. To estimate how big it is, the astronomers must rely on measurements of the planet's brightness. Like all planets, this new one presumably shines by reflecting sunlight. The bigger the planet, generally speaking, the bigger the reflection. The reflectance, the fraction of light that bounces off the planet, is not yet known. Nevertheless, it is possible to set limits on the planet's diameter:

"Even if it reflected 100 percent of the light reaching it, it would still be as big as Pluto," says Brown. Pluto is 1400 miles (2300 km) wide. "I'd say it's probably [about] one and a half times the size of Pluto, but we're not sure."

The planet's temporary name is 2003 UB313. A permanent name has been proposed by the discoverers to the International Astronomical Union, and they are awaiting the decision of this body before announcing the name. Stay tuned!



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"Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind." - Dr. Seuss