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Mark from Liverpool - possibility of a tenth planet in the solar system (12.05.2002)

I’ve been interested in space and astronomy since i was about 5 years old and I've wanted to study it in more depth. I have spent much time over the years collecting and studying information via the internet and basically upgrading my knowledge of the universe.

I also look at the connection between space and many ancient cultures here on earth and have noticed that some ancient civilisations mention a tenth planet in the solar system (Nubiru), which can support life and has an orbit further out and quite similar to pluto only travelling through the centre of the solar system once every 3,600 years as it passes between mars and earth. I have found more information on this when searching archeological websites, which have depictions of this on ancient summerian tablets and temples.

I would like to know if there is any more evidence to support this and if so how will this effect what we know of space today!

please final frontier, can you shed some light on this matter!

Reply
There have been various periods when people have proposed the presence of additional "planets" in the Solar system - what is important to remember is that we only identified 9 planets in the solar system back in 1930 when Clyde Tombaugh found Pluto (and there is still debate on whether Pluto counts as a true planet or not!). So, ancient civilisations were not proposing a 10th planet (they only identified the planets out to Saturn, and many included the Sun and Moon in their count), but several mythologies do talk about planet-like bodies, such as Nubiru, which play important roles within their astrologically-based belief systems.

In the case of Nubiru, which features in a lot of strange modern mythologies related to gnosticism and Velikovsky-like tales of planets moving around the Solar System, no such body can realistically exist. The sort of orbit proposed would be highly unstable, and would certainly leave many tell-tale perturbations within bodies in the Solar system. However, we cannot completely rule out the possibility that further Pluto-like bodies exist beyond the orbit of Pluto (indeed they almost certainly do, but will be very hard to find!), as this region of the Solar System is home to literally trillions of icy bodies which are the source of comets. Indeed, studies of cometary orbits has recently thrown up the possibility that there may be a large body (Pluto-sized or bigger) out in the deepest edges of the Solar System which is tugging comet orbits around.

Over 20 years ago, people proposed a mysterious outer body, variously identified as a companion star to the Sun (a dim, and now distant, brown or red dwarf; "Nemesis") or a massive Jupiter-like planet, which was on an orbit with a period of around 26-30 million years, causing period "rains" of comets from the Oort Cloud which resulted in mass extinctions seen in the Earth's fossil record. Despite having searched about 99% of the possible locations for such an object, no-one has succeeded in finding it.

So, despite several theories, this body has not been identified yet, and people have been searching for the 10th "planet" (often called Planet X, which combines mystery and the Roman numeral for 10 conveniently!) for some time.
Paul Roche
Final Frontier