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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
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