Planet X vs. Nibiru in the news; when pseudo-science hijacks genuine science, and how to tell the difference

This week a proposed new planet far out in our Solar System was announced in the news.  I was asked by a non-scientist:

Okay, so as a newbie to astronomy, does this Planet of Niburu aka Planet X exist?

Their email included a link to this blog post from live.slooh.com:

http://main.slooh.com/event/is-newly-discovered-planet-nine-the-lost-planet-of-nibiru/

I'd never heard of Slooh.com, and the blog post started off innocuously enough:

Researchers at Caltech announced on January 19th they had discovered evidence of an as-yet unseen giant planet, 10 times the size of the Earth, which may be tracing a bizarre orbit requiring 10,000 to 20,000 years to make a revolution of the Sun.

CalTech researchers, Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown, made the discovery using mathematical models and computer simulations. The planet itself has not yet been viewed through a telescope, but they hope their new paper on the discovery will inspire astronomers to attempt to find it. They say Planet Nine helps explain a number of mysterious features of the field of icy objects and debris beyond Neptune known as the Kuiper Belt.

"Although we were initially quite skeptical that this planet could exist, as we continued to investigate its orbit and what it would mean for the outer solar system, we become increasingly convinced that it is out there," says Batygin, an assistant professor of planetary science. "For the first time in over 150 years, there is solid evidence that the solar system's planetary census is incomplete."

This much is true (well, I wouldn't have the used the word "mysterious" but "peculiar").  I had read the Nature News article summarizing the recently published scientific paper, which goes through a peer review process before being accepted for publication:

http://www.nature.com/news/evidence-grows-for-giant-planet-on-fringes-of-solar-system-1.19182?WT.mc_id=TWT_NatureNews

and the actual scientific paper, containing all the lovely jargon and math astronomers need to specifically and precisely communicate their findings:

http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/0004-6256/151/2/22

But then the slooh.com blog post switched gears into the realm of pseudo-science in a way that a non-astronomer would have trouble noticing:

This isn't the first time that someone has suggested that an unknown giant planet could exist beyond what we consider the edge of our Solar System. It's just the first time scientists have found their own evidence to support any version of that claim. In his 1976 book, The 12th Planet, Zecharia Sitchin, a proponent of theories of ancient astronauts, claimed that Sumerian and Babylonian mythology supported the idea of another planet orbiting well outside the reach of the planet Neptune. He named this planet Nibiru, and claimed that every 3,600 years, the planet's orbit brought it past Earth so its inhabitants could interact with humanity.
In 1995, Nancy Lieder, a self-described "contactee", warned the world about an impending cataclysm. Lieder claimed that Nibiru, which she originally referred to as Planet X, was doomed to collide with Earth, causing an apocalyptic event that would flip the magnetic poles of the planet. This cataclysm was originally predicted to occur in 2003, but was delayed to coincide with the Mayan Calendar conspiracy of 2012, then delayed again. Sitchin has denied claims that Lieder's planet and his are one and the same.

So, to a trained eye like my own, there is definitely pseudo-science mixed in there.  To be fair, the article does go on to address this "controversy" and acknowledges Nibiru is a "figment of imagination" and this new discovery is "supported by science":

Astronomers, though, have long disputed the existence of Nibiru, and have insisted that there is no threat to Earth. In fact, Mike Brown, one of the authors on this brand new paper, has been one of the most vocal opponents of what he refers to as "pseudo-science". Brown has said that a planet with an orbit like that which is assumed about Nibiru would only have lasted about a million years in our Solar System before being ejected by Jupiter, and that the idea that any planet could force a flip in Earth's magnetic field defies the laws of physics.

But conspiracy theorists won't back down from their beliefs, holding fast to the claim that NASA continuously denies proof of the existence of Nibiru. Most of these involve claims that Nibiru has actually been observed in a variety of telescopes and sky surveys, but that evidence of those observations have been redacted.

During our live broadcast, we'll take a look at these two worlds -- one the figment of imagination, the other an unobserved world supported by science -- and discuss the coincidental intersection of science fiction and science fact.

This "Nibiru" planet has been fear-mongering people on the internet for at least a decade. People would post pictures of the overexposed Sun or Moon with internal camera reflections claiming to be of the Sun (or moon) and Nibiru, and occasionally Photoshopped:

Internal reflections in camera optics, also called ghosting or lens flares, are well understood and common. Here's some example web pages describing the effect:

https://photographylife.com/what-is-ghosting-and-flare

http://darkerview.com/CCDProblems/internalreflection.php 

This is not to be confused with another digital camera artifact that has been falsely associated with "Nibiru" as well, called saturation, like these over-exposed objects (probably Solar System planets) in this Sun monitoring satellite image:

Not planet Nibiru either.  Nor a UFO.

This ESO page has an excellent summary of common CCD (digital camera) artifacts seen in astronomical images:

https://www.eso.org/~ohainaut/ccd/CCD_artifacts.html
 

The Nibiru internet hoax reached a preposterous level in 2003, stoking fears on the internet of a planetary collision with Earth that were entirely unfounded.  Some UCLA solar astronomers posted this in front of their webcam on Mt Wilson when I was in graduate school at UCLA:

 

This was in response to some of the Planet X hoaxers using an image from the same webcam showing the moon and a crescent "Nibiru", which was in fact just an overexposed moon and an internal reflection within the camera optics:

 

As far as astronomers know, there is no undiscovered planet that is Earth-sized and on a highly elongated orbit that comes into the inner Solar System on a semi-regular basis.  Jupiter's gravitational influence would have ejected it long ago as Mike Brown states above.

Astronomers have looked for planets far out in our Solar System.  Why wouldn't we want to find one?  Moderate fame and "fortune" would await, right?  Maybe even a Nobel prize.  The NASA WISE mission, which mapped almost the entire sky at infrared wavelengths of light and was used to find many near-Earth asteroids, was able to rule out Saturn and Jupiter sized objects way out in our Solar System, except in the really dense stellar regions towards the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy.  In the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy, the field of view is so crowded with distant stars, it is difficult to see relatively nearby Solar System objects moving by. This study was published only two years ago.  Science moves fast!

https://www.nasa.gov/press/2014/march/nasas-wise-survey-finds-thousands-of-new-stars-but-no-planet-x/#.VqUAk_H19ks

And the scientific paper:

http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0004-637X/781/1/4/pdf

The point is - we've looked!  In this study, the NASA WISE mission didn't have the sensitivity to see something like this new hypothesized Planet X, with a mass around that of Neptune.  It simply would have been too faint to have been seen with that space telescope.

This new possible planet is inferred indirectly from detailed simulations of the orbits of objects out near the orbit of Pluto called "Kuiper Belt Objects" which is where many of our comets come from.  Mike Brown is the second author on this paper, and he's also the scientist that "demoted Pluto" from planet status to dwarf planet status by discovering some of these Kuiper Belt Objects, including several that are similar in size to Pluto. 
  
The authors of the paper found that the orbits of a subset of these newly discovered Kuiper Belt Objects had curiously aligned orbits.  Much like the mapped orbit of Uranus led astronomers to predict the existence of Neptune, this new paper is claiming that the peculiar orbits of these Kuiper Belt Objects points to the existence of this possible new planet.    So, we haven't seen the new planet directly.  We've only got fairly solid evidence that it should exist.  We're not even entirely well constrained on what part of the sky it will be found in.  That will take more time and research.

This new hypothesized planet won't come closer to the Sun than about 200 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun (~100 million miles, or what astronomers define to be 1 Astronomical Unit or AU).  And we do see evidence of some exoplanets orbiting other stars that far out (http://exoplanetarchive.ipac.caltech.edu/).  So, the possible existence of such a planet is not entirely unheard of in other stellar systems.  And we know that the disk of material available to form a planet when a star is very young can extend that far out as well (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AU_Microscopii). 

Why is this possible new planet and these Kuiper Belt Object discoveries just happening within the past 20 years?  Why didn't we find them 100 years ago?    

Well, the Kuiper Belt Objects are frozen cold "dirty snowballs" and made out of the same material that comets are made of. In fact, many of the comets that we periodically see in our inner Solar System get their start in the Kuiper Belt out beyond the orbit of Neptune. It was because of the orbits of comets that did come closer to the Sun that we knew this belt of objects must exist out beyond the orbit of Neptune as far back as the 1930s (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuiper_belt).  In fact, the first discoveries of true Kuiper Belt Objects in the 1990s was a great triumph of the Scientific Method developing a theory that made a prediction that was testable and eventually shown to be true by repeated experiments (telescope observations).

Because Kuiper Belt Objects are frozen dirty snowballs and not stars powered by nuclear fusion, they don't emit much of their own light at visible wavelengths that we can see, but rather reflect sunlight.  The further away they are from the Sun, the less Sunlight they will reflect, and it falls off very steeply with distance from the Sun (1/D⁴).  So, these objects are very faint, and require searching large portions of the sky.  Put those two things together, and you need large telescopes, lots of data, and advanced software to handle processing and searching it all.  It is far too much to search by hand, and we rely on computers to do much of the tedious work for us today.  These objects also emit their own heat, which is what the WISE mission searched for at infrared wavelengths.  But again these objects are so far away they end up giving off very little heat because they're so cold. 
 

So, how can you distinguish science from pseudo-science?

Being a busy scientist myself, it's too easy for me to say "trust us."  For example, the nature.com website which regularly published peer-reviewed scientific papers is "trustworthy" whereas a "planet x" website is not (http://planetxnews.com/).  Such a logical argument is called an "appeal to authority".  And yes, while astronomers are authorities on astronomy, this is a weak logical argument to use.   Why should you trust my blog post over another?

The answer lies in the predictive power of the scientific method.   It is GOOD to be skeptical.   Scientists make predictions that can be tested.   So, test them!  Get educated enough to do the experiment yourself.  Because you DON'T have to take my word for it.  That is the beauty of science.

Proponents of the Nibiru planet did make predictions, and they failed again and again.  In 2003, in 2012. No mysterious Nibiru planet came swinging by the Earth to destroy us.  You would think by now one would recognize that their pseudo-scientific theory was wrong, rather than trusting their next prediction that will come to pass without incident.

But we can go further.   Drs Batygin and Brown predicted that we will find a new population of Kuiper Belt Objects whose orbits should follow a particular pattern, if this Planet X does exist.  And of course, we will look for direct images of this planet.  However, the current information doesn't give us enough data to pinpoint its location (yet), and it will be very faint.  So, we're going to look for these new Kuiper Belt Objects.  It will require more dedicated telescope surveys.  With time, the possible location of Planet X will become clearer, and maybe we'll find it.  Maybe it will take 50 years.  Maybe we won't find Planet X and maybe we'll find a better solution for the peculiar orbits of some Kuiper Belt Objects that does not require a Planet X (although unlikely).

Another pseudo-scientific claim that is often made is that NASA hides data or evidence of a Nibiru planet.  All NASA mission data is public.  NASA is funded by the public taxes.  Here is a link to the WISE mission data:

http://irsa.ipac.caltech.edu/Missions/wise.html 

You can find other mission data with a quick Google search.  There's nothing missing or hidden.  You can check for yourself.  One caveat is that you may need to educate yourself.  Ignorance is not an excuse.  If you genuinely want to know the difference between science and pseudo-science, you'll have to learn some of the science yourself in order to perform the experiments yourself.

So, the next time someone posts a photo of planet "Nibiru" next to the Sun, go outside the next clear day.  Is it still there?  Can you see it with your own eyes?  If not, why not? Wouldn't that be damning evidence against the Nibiru pseudo-science?  You don't have to take my word (authority), but do you really think thousands of professional astronomers would miss it, or conversely all work to cover it up?  And somehow a few internet websites with authors with little professional training and experience (who don't even understand the basics of camera optics) were able to find it?  Occam's razor suggests otherwise.  In the case of the "crescent Nibiru" seen on a UCLA Solar Observatory webcam back on May 26th, 2003, go ahead and use a lunar calculator online to figure out the phase of the moon on the night that web cam image was taken.  It matches up perfectly.  Here's a link: http://tycho.usno.navy.mil/vphase.html

Next, try taking your own pictures to reproduce the internal camera reflections that look like "Nibiru".  It might not be as easy with modern cell phone cameras that can have optical coatings to minimize internal reflections.  If you can create an internal reflection, you'll quickly see that what is in your digital image doesn't match what you see with your own eyes.  Try a different angle.  How about a different time of day?  Go to a location where the Sun is visible but any real "Nibiru" should be blocked by a object on the horizon.  If it's an internal camera reflection you should still see this effect.

In fact, I just took my iPhone 5S cell phone, pointed it at a light in my ceiling at an angle, and got this picture.  Is it 9 planet Nibiru's in my kitchen orbiting my light bulb?  No, it's an internal reflection of the over-exposed LED lights:

Not planet Nibiru either.

Science progresses through the ability to independently verify the claims of others.  Sometimes we as scientists fail to show you how to do this, and too often rely on asking you to take our word for it.   So, don't take my word for it. 

By the way, Dr.s Batygin and Brown have nicknamed the hypothetical new planet "Fattie".