The Discovery of Planet X - Atlantis Rising Magazine

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As recently as our March/April issue, Atlantis Rising reported on new claims for the discovery of a long-sought ninth planet in the solar system (with Pluto now excluded, eight remain, officially speaking). The existence of the legendary body, often referred to as “Planet X,” has long been dismissed as strictly imaginary, but detractors, it turns out, may have spoken too soon.

In his 1975 best-selling book, The Twelfth Planet, and its many sequels (as we reported in A.R., #116 “Planet X or Not?), the late researcher Zecharia Sitchin claimed he had decoded from the ancient cuneiform tablets of Sumeria, the story of a mysterious rogue planet which periodically (every 3600 years) approached the vicinity of Earth. Named ‘Nibiru’, the planet was populated, said Sitchin, by a powerful, technologically advanced race of giants known as the Anunnaki, which intervened forcefully in the affairs of Earth, accounting—Sitchin believed—for many of the anomalies of our ancient history. Ever since publication of The Twelfth Planet, legions of Sitchin acolytes have searched in vain for scientific evidence for the existence of ‘Planet X’.

Arguments over the possibility of another planet beyond the orbit of Neptune have raged since long before Sitchin, but nothing conclusive has ever appeared. Then, in December 2015, fresh scientific news on the subject emerged with the release of two Swedish papers to the website for the Journal of Astronomy of Astrophysics. The new findings soon rekindled the long-simmering debate and generated headlines around the world. The Swedes claimed to have spotted a new, relatively large, body out in the neighborhood of Pluto. Astronomer Wouter Vlemmings at Chalmers University of Technology, co-author of both studies, reported observation of an object moving against background stars, which was then dubbed Gna, after a swift Nordic deity who delivers messages for Frigg, the goddess of wisdom.

Unfortunately, or so it seemed at the time for Planet X believers, both papers were immediately dismissed by the astronomical establishment. The object reported, it was thought, might possibly be a large asteroid. Nevertheless, further analysis remained to be done, so the file—at least in theory—stayed open. The big news came in January, after Atlantis Rising’s March/April issue had already gone to press. “The solar system appears to have a new ninth planet,” trumpeted the prestigious magazine Science. A new study from two “respected planetary scientists” was making the case this time. According to Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, as published in The Astronomical Journal, this discovery is different from all the previously claimed Planet X findings. “We believe it enough,” says Brown, “where we’re willing to write a paper and stand up and say, ‘Yes. For the past century everybody who said there was a Planet X is crazy. And they were all wrong. But we’re right.’”

Brown got his first clue to his current conclusions in 2003, when he led a team that found Sedna, an object slightly smaller than both Eris and Pluto. Sedna’s odd, far-flung orbit made it, then, the most distant known object in the solar system. Its perihelion, or closest point to the sun, lay at 76 AU (Astronomical Unit—the distance from the Earth to the Sun), beyond the Kuiper belt and far outside the influence of Neptune’s gravity. The implication was clear: Something massive, well beyond Neptune, must have pulled Sedna into its distant orbit.

Not everyone is convinced that a new planet has been found. In a January edition of Atlantic magazine, Science writer Thomas Levenson says, “There aren’t any obvious errors in Batygin and Brown’s gravitational argument, but nature has plenty of ways to fool astronomers into seeing planets where there are none. Any mass exerts (as Newton saw it) a pull on everything else, and Newton’s universal law of gravitation describes how strong that tug will be, and what motion would result. In the case of Neptune and, presumptively, Planet Nine, undiscovered objects reveal themselves in the unexplained residues of motion of what’s already been observed, once all the known gravitational influences have been tallied up.”

As for the folks at NASA… Though they admit they’re excited by the possibility of a new planetary discovery, caution still reigns. “The idea of a new planet is certainly an exciting one,” NASA’s director of planetary science, Jim Green, told the Christian Science Monitor, but he qualified, “It’s too early to say with certainty that there is a so-called ‘Planet X’ out there.”