Astronomers please, "Planet X" visibilty question?

Question

Since earlier this year I keep hearing about and seeing online articles and videos about Planet X. If such a thing was found wouldn't its orbit already have plotted out and named by someone? For something like a planet to be approaching Earth wouldn't there be many astronomers, even the backyard astronomer, easily be able to keep track of something in or close to our solar system? Then that leads to the supposed evidence from the people who found that this planet will travel so close to our planet there would be a polar shift or a cataclysmic explosion. What does it all mean?

Answer 1

Planet X does not exist.

Even if it was far from Earth we would be able to detect it in the infrared, and we have mapped the sky with satellites (infrared space telescopes) several times. It is not there.

It is nonsense.

There is NO EVIDENCE for this mythical planet.

Answer 2

It is true that if anything even approaching the alleged size of this planet was only 4 years away from earth's orbit, amateurs could see it in their telescopes and professional astronomers would have discovered it years ago.  Given the most common information we are told about this thing, this forum's contributor, "bikenbeer2000", kindly did a calculation for me a few days ago, showing that it would have a magnitude of about 7.4 right now.

There will be no polar shifts or cataclysms of any kind due to this Planet X (or Nibiru), because they don't exist.

Answer 3

yup: if it existed and was going to be in our vicinity in 2012 it would have already been detected.

nothing more than a cruel and cynical hoax.

Answer 4

It all means that there are people who live in our world who are willing to believe in something even when there is no proof to support it.

People who desire the world to be mysterious and magical or persons who seek to give their lives meaning by deluding themselves that they were chosen to witness the end of the world. The gullable. The uneducated. Persons who have difficulty seperating reality from fiction.

There will always be a sucker out there willing to toss his money away on a bottle of snake oil.

Answer 5

You are using logic in asking a question about the mysterious 'Planet X' (or Nibiru). You can't do that. I don't know how much time you have spent in Yahoo Answers, but I have come to realize that logic does not apply to this topic. It gets asked about 200 times a day by people who have nothing better than try to support their misguided belief that the world will end in 2012. There is ZERO evidence to support this! Unfortunately intelligent questions like your will not deter these idiots, er, I mean individuals, from hiding under their beds and worrying about the end of the world. Alas.

Answer 6

magnitude 7.4 eh... for reference, stars that are visible to the naked eye are in the range of magnitude 0 - 6. pluto, discovered over 70 years ago, is magnitude 15 on average. higher magnitude is fainter, obviously. some recently discovered solar system objects are even fainter, sedna for instance is about magnitude 20. and this is a logarithmic scale, meaning that each order of magnitude is a constant multiplying factor fainter than the previous one.

so it would seem to me that either planet x has a romulan invisibility cloak kind of thing making it appear 8-13 or so magnitudes fainter than an object of its size and distance should be, or it doesn't exist. I wonder which is more likely...

Answer 7

It's all bullshit.

Answer 8

Indeed, the first answerers are right. It's all complete fallacy. It's all inspired by idiotic morons trying to spread paranoia after their attempts in 2000, and 2003 failed. After 2012 passes and we find ourselves (once again) not obliterated, those very same idiots will conveniently...  reschedule... Armageddon to some other date.

Answer 9

It all adds up to one inescapable conclusion. There is no such planet.

Answer 10

From the (fictitious) information supplied by various 2012 websites, Planet X is the size of the earth and is in a 3600 year orbit and approaches the earth's orbit at the end of 2012. This is sufficient to program into a solar system simulator (Starry Night Enthusiast) which tells us that the said object would now be magnitude 7.4, thus visible in binoculars. The fact that it isn't visible leads me to the conclusion that this object, as described, doesn't exist.