The Planet X Saga: The Scientific Arguments in a Nutshell

Let me be very clear here: Nancy Lieder, Mark Hazlewood and the rest of these Planet X people (hereafter referred to as "PXPs") are completely wrong. No rogue giant planet is about to destroy the Earth, in May 2003 or otherwise. The webpages on this and other sites give lots of details, but I thought it might help if I made a brief synopsis of the arguments I and others make to debunk this pseudoscientific silliness. Listed below are the major points against the claims of the PXPs. Feel free to use them to make yourself feel better, or to use on someone who is contemplating the Dark Side.

• Ancient texts do not discuss the existence of a tenth planet.
• There is no astronomical indication of the existence of another large planet in the inner solar system.
• The Sun is not acting in any way abnormally.
• There are not more earthquakes than normal.
• There has been a lot of weird weather lately
• Brown dwarfs are not at all the way Planet X people describe.
• Observatories are not being closed suspiciously.
• The pictures that have been posted are either outright fakes or being misinterpreted.
• I am not a government disinformation agent.
• The Grand Conclusion (guess what it is)
• Links and acknowledgements

Ancient texts do not discuss the existence of a tenth planet.

Image of the Berlin Seal, which doesn't show Planet X

But there are two major problems with this. Well, three, if you count having alien visitations as a problem (and I certainly do). But ignoring that, there are still two biggies. Sitchin claims that the picture shows Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. But the Sumerians didn't have telescopes, and therefore could only have known of them if aliens told them about their existence. But if aliens told them about those planets, why not about the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, or Saturn's rings? The seal doesn't show any of these features. And the Sumerians thought the Moon and Sun were planets, when they aren't. Certainly aliens would know that the Sun and Moon are not planets! Sitchin is picking and choosing things in the picture to support his arguments, and ignoring things that don't support it. That isn't science, it's fantasy. It's also wrong.

Conclusion: Sitchin's ideas are wrong, and so there is no reason to even introduce the idea of a tenth planet that passes by the Earth.

There is no astronomical indication of the existence of another large planet in the inner solar system.

Image of Jupiter in the night sky (click to enlarge), from Astronomy Picture of the Day

Look at Jupiter. Literally! It's about ten times the diameter of the Earth, and it's on average about 750 million kilometers (450 million miles) away. It is easily visible to the naked eye, and in fact is usually the fourth or fifth brightest object in the sky (the Sun, Moon, and Venus are brighter, and Mars can sometimes be brighter than Jupiter).

Yet, for Planet X to be here in less then a decade, it can't be farther than a billion or so kilometers away. Even at that distance, it would be one of the brightest objects in the sky. Even if it were too faint to be seen with the naked eye, it would still be seen easily even if it were billions of kilometers away. Remember, tiny Pluto is 5 billion kilometers out, and can be easily detected using modern equipment, and Pluto is way smaller than Planet X is supposed to be. There is simply no way a big planet so close to Earth could have escaped astronomers' detection-- even amateur astronomers, who even Lieder and Hazlewood must realize have no reason to lie-- all these decades.

Also, a giant planet has giant gravity. Neptune was discovered because of its gravitational effects on Saturn and Uranus. Planet X, if it were anywhere near the inner solar system (and in truth, even a long way out), would pull on those planets. This pull would affect their orbits, and we'd see that. We don't. Some of the Planet X proponents talk about how the outer planets' orbits are indeed affected, but they are relying on very old data. In fact, the planets are exactly where they should be given the nine planets we know about.

A lot of PXPs talk about a couple of scientific papers published which talk about perturbations in comet orbits indicating a possible tenth planet. I have read both papers, and found them to be interesting, but unlikely. They are more speculation than hard science, in my opinion. But even if they are correct, they would indicate a planet that is way, way farther out than Hazlewood and Lieder claim for Planet X, and in fact would indicate there is no massive planet closer to the inner solar system. As usual, by pointing out scientific evidence they think supports their position, the PXPs are actually highlighting evidence against them.

Another favorite claim of Mark Hazlewood is that NASA found the tenth planet back in 1983, and even announced it. This is patently untrue. What really happened was that a satellite used to make astronomical observations in infrared light found several objects that were previously unidentified. During a press conference, the astronomers made a list of potential sources, including (but not limited to) a tenth planet. Of course, the headline in the Washington Post zeroed in on the planet possibility, but science is generally not done by headlines. Sure enough, follow-up observations made later showed clearly that most of the objects were distant galaxies, and another was a gas cloud in our own Galaxy. No planet.

Of course, Hazlewood and his ilk claim that NASA got wise and quickly covered up the discovery of the tenth planet, but let's face it, that claim is pretty dumb. This was a NASA press conference in the first place, and if they were this ultra-competent super-secret organization that Hazlewood makes them out to be, or even if they were middling-competent bureaucrats, the press conference wouldn't have been held in the first place! And at the very least, the astronomers involved would have been briefed not to reveal anything secret. The PXPs want it both ways: they want NASA to be so good they can change journal articles, web pages, astronomical catalogs and more with iron-clad authority, but so bumbling they couldn't keep two astronomers and a DC reporter shut up. Puhleeze!

Conclusion: Planet X has no physical effects, has never been seen, and therefore doesn't exist.

The Sun is not acting in any way abnormally.

This is wrong. The Sun did indeed peak in the year 2000, but these peaks are not sudden; they grow and fade slowly, over years. In fact, each peak actually has two sub-peaks; solar activity rises, then declines, then rises again a year or so later, as can be seen in the plot shown (click on it to bring up a bigger version of the image). We are just now finishing up the second peak, and as you can see we should expect plenty of activity on the Sun. I talked to a couple of solar astronomers, and they both told me that the flares and CMEs in the second peak tend to be more violent than in the first, so we actually expect more energetic activity in the second peak, that is, now.

Conclusion: the Sun is acting normally, and its behavior does not support the existence of Planet X.

There are not more earthquakes than normal.

This is wrong. The table displayed here (click on it to bring up a bigger version of the image) shows earthquake activity over the past 13 years. The quakes are divided by strength (vertically) and year (horizontally). The data are complete for 2002, meaning every earthquake measured is there.

If Planet X is nearly here, then you'd expect to see an increase of major earthquake activity over time, with 2002 having the most. Surprise! It doesn't. In fact, 2002 is usually average or even below average in the number of major earthquakes for a given magnitude that occurred.

You may notice that the actual total number of earthquakes does appear to increase with time, but that is not because there are more earthquakes. It's because we're getting better at detecting them! As instruments become more sensitive, more earthquakes are detected. Note that the increase is mostly in the number of small quakes, which are usually harder to detect. Better instrumentation naturally detects smaller quakes more easily, increasing the total number found without changing the number of big quakes found, because those are easy to detect and we catch them all with less sensitive equipment. Supporting this is the last line of the graph, which shows only a few very weak earthquakes in the 0-1 range. There are probably more of those than any other earthquake, but are far harder to detect unambiguously (a car driving by might look just like a magnitude 0.1 earthquake to a seismograph). The United States Geological Survey has a webpage describing exactly this finding. So, if Planet X is real and affecting us, it must be suppressing earthquakes, not causing them.

There were two big earthquakes in January 2003, both over 7 on the Richter scale. The PXPs went nuts about them. But look at the plot! Two magnitude 7 earthquakes in one month means you'd expect 24 in a year, right? Well, you can see that 24 magnitude 7 earthquakes per year is just about right given the earthquake history. So once again, by bringing this data to everyone's attention, the Planet X people are shooting themselves in the foot.

Conclusion: there no more earthquakes than usual, and therefore earthquakes cannot be used to support the existence of Planet X.

There has been a lot of weird weather lately.

First off, surprise! The weather isn't all that weird. We are coming off of an El Nino, which is a weather pattern that disrupts climates across the world. Also, we are now into springtime, when things like tornadoes are common. Seeing tornadoes in Texas and Oklahoma is not only not unusual, but is expected!

There have been some records broken this year, but there are weather records broken every year. This is exactly the same sort of bad logic used in the earthquake argument, and is just as wrong. Even a cursory web search yields lots of pages about the odd weather we get as El Nino departs.

And even if it were true, how could the weather possibly be to tied to an incoming planet? If you assume electromagnetic forces, we'd see huge changes in our aurora before we'd see changes in the weather, and we see no such changes. If it were gravitational, then there would be countless other, far larger effects. Long before the weather were disrupted, we'd see changes in the Moon's orbit that were so big they would be unmistakable. They would certainly throw off the timings of eclipses, and we'll see on May 15th that there will be a lunar eclipse right on schedule.

Conclusion: the weather isn't any weirder than it usually is at the end of an El Nino, so the claims of weird weather are wrong.

Brown dwarfs are not at all the way Planet X people describe.

Also, even an old, dim brown dwarf puts out light. A typical dim brown dwarf would still be a very bright object if it were anywhere near the inner solar system, or even located way out beyond Pluto. I even show my math! Remember too that a brown dwarf will still reflect sunlight (like Jupiter and the other planets do), making it even brighter. So if Planet X were a brown dwarf, it would have been obvious in the sky years ago.

Conclusion: Nancy Lieder and Mark Hazlewood do not understand