Gill Broussard's Planet 7X

Gill Broussard has been making the rounds on various "alternative media" shows lately, going viral for his theory that a planet 7 times the size and mass of earth is swooping through the solar system and will make a very close approach to earth in March 2016. He has been featured by John B Wells, BPEarthwatch, and many others in the last few weeks.


He has published a book where he claims to describe this planet and its orbit:
www.danielholdings.com...
Other posters here do reference Gill from time to time, but as far as I can tell there are no official threads for discussing Gill's claims. Let me cut right to the chase, I used the charts and information he published in his book to derive the orbital elements of his claimed planet. He would not give those elements out publicly, though when asked directly he did give out specific coordinates for a particular observing location and point in time (which lands in agreement with the elements I determined, more on that in the video below). How did I do that using only the charts he gave? Well I'll show you. This figure is from page 38 of his book and can be seen in various webcast interviews that he has done:

The figure has clearly been made using Starry Night software. You can tell because of the distinctive triangles and pips that are present on the orbits of the planets and on Gill's orbit which is the elliptical orbit running through the image. This tells us very specific information we need to know about the orientation of the orbits in this image and therefore the orientation of Gill's orbit. Specifically, the triangles represent the nodes of the orbit while the pips represent the longitude of perihelion of each orbit. Fortunately we know the longitude of perihelion for the planets like Mercury and Venus, so we can use that information to determine the longitude of perihelion and the longitude of the ascending node of the unknown orbit, Gill's planet. We can also measure the distance of perihelion from the sun in the image and determine the approximate perihelion distance of the orbit of Planet 7X:

The longitudes of perihelia for Venus and Mercury are about 131.2 and 77.5 degrees respectively, so a difference of 53.7 degrees is exactly what we expect and what we observe in this figure. The unknown orbit has a longitude of perihelion measured to be about 4.46 degrees higher than Mercury, so its longitude of perihelion is about 81.96 degrees. The longitude of ascending node marked by a triangle turns out to be 81.96 degrees less than the longitude of perihelion, so it's 0 degrees and the argument of perihelion (lon of peri + lon of ascending node) is 81.96 degrees. The perihelion distance of Venus in the image is about 148.7 pixels, and given a perihelion distance of about 0.71843 AU, that means a pixel scale of about 207 pixels per AU. I know Venus isn't perfectly on the ecliptic, but this figure still agrees well if you measure the perihelion distances of Earth and Mercury in the image as well. It also means that given a perihelion pixel distance of about 71.8 pixels, Gill's planet has a perihelion distance of about 0.34686 AU. Later in the book Gill also gives the inclination from the plane of the ecliptic as being roughly 0.02 degrees and he also mentions the perihelion date as being February 17, 2016. On page 38 he also mentions it having a "319+ year orbit" so for a planet 7x earth's mass that corresponds to a semi-major axis of 46.69 AU. Given the semi-major axis and the perihelion distance we know that eccentricity must be about 0.99257. Put all of this together and you have all the orbital elements of his planet. Importing these numbers back into Starry Night reproduces his figure perfectly:

I used this information to search along his orbit, including a slightly altered orbit with an argument of perihelion of 76.96 degrees to match better with his prediction of a very close encounter between this planet and earth in March 2016. The coordinates he gave to a friend of mine land right in between what I refer to as my "measured" orbit and the "alternative" orbit based on the above prediction. I searched not only that region, but also all the way along his orbit for any moving planet even if it were several years off of his predicted time of arrival. This search was conducted in infrared on June 23 and June 28:


I astrometrically solved all 42 images and analyzed them to look for any moving planet (links to every image are in the description of the video below). Despite searching in infrared and down to magnitudes many times dimmer than Gill's claim (he claims it should already have reached naked eye magnitudes and should readily visible from suburban skies by December) I found nothing but hot pixels and the occasional cosmic ray strike:

Simply put, Gill's Planet 7X does not exist.

I suppose if you can't see it in infrared, and you can't see if it were an icy shiny body, then it doesn't exist.

originally posted by: smurfy
I suppose if you can't see it in infrared, and you can't see if it were an icy shiny body, then it doesn't exist.

If it were an icy shiny body then it would have an even higher albedo and reflect even more of the sun's light and be even more obvious. According to Gill himself, it's already brighter than magnitude 6.5!

originally posted by: ngchunter

originally posted by: smurfy
I suppose if you can't see it in infrared, and you can't see if it were an icy shiny body, then it doesn't exist.

If it were an icy shiny body then it would have an even higher albedo and reflect even more of the sun's light and be even more obvious. According to Gill himself, it's already brighter than magnitude 6.5!

Exactly!

On last night's "Sky at NIght" programme they showed how easy it is to capture Pluto with an ordinary telescope and digital camera.

Tiny, far away Pluto.

Yet somehow this massive planet already much closer to us than Pluto is invisible to all of the people watching the skies.

Except someone with a book of gibberish to sell...

Well done OP. I do follow Planet 7x on YouTube and enjoy the videos. I seldom discuss it here due to people just generally being snarky turds about everything and laying waste to virtually every civilized discussion.

Some of the information presented is fascinating. I mainly watch to see what past accounts of inexplicable astrological observation gets dug up. All of the predictions and expectations I take with a salt block.

I especially enjoyed the presentation on the bronze disk found in Germany in 1999.

I do believe we have seen strange things in the past. I hope to see something amazing in my lifetime up there. Don't really care if it's 7x or not. Hell just a random distant supernova would suffice for me.

originally posted by: ngchunter
Gill Broussard has been making the rounds on various "alternative media" shows lately, going viral for his theory that a planet 7 times the size and mass of earth...

Well, there's his first screw-up. He must not have been paying attention in high school geometry - that bit about volume going up as the cube of the radius. A globe 7 times the size of the Earth would have 343 times the volume. Assuming the same density as the Earth (5514 kg/m), it would have 343 time the mass. That's more massive than Jupiter. Of course, 7 times the size would rank it in size between Uranus (4 x the radius of Earth) and Saturn (9.5 x the radius), so it would be same to assume it (like those two worlds) is a gas giant planet which would give it a density 1/8 to 1/4 that of rocky Earth. This would yield a mass between 42 and 85 times the mass of Earth.

Mind you, an object that big would be easily visible to the naked eye (as a star-like dot at night - not a stupidly large disk adjacent to the Sun) when more that 10 AU out (the distance to Saturn) and more than 3 years before reaching the inner solar system. Since the Earth will go around the Sun several times during its approach, there is no way that this intruder could "hide behind the sun".

If Broussard's planet was only 7 times the mass of Earth, then it would be a bit less than twice the size of our world. It would still be naked-eye visible when more than 5 AU out (the distance to Jupiter) and a year from its encounter with Earth.

I used the charts and information he published in his book to derive the orbital elements of his claimed planet.

Can you please post your 6-line elements and epoch? I'd like to plug them into some software I have. Thanks in advance.

On page 38 he also mentions it having a "319+ year orbit" so for a planet 7x earth's mass that corresponds to a semi-major axis of 46.69 AU.

REALLY?!?! So when it came around in 1697, astronomers including Newton, Halley, Flamsteed, Hooke and others somehow missed it. Must've been cloudy... everywhere... for years.

Simply put, Gill's Planet 7X does not exist.

originally posted by: ngchunter
Gill Broussard has been making the rounds on various "alternative media" shows lately....

He has published a book

Well, there you go. Those are the only two sentences I needed to see... But, indeed, nice work OP.

It always fascinates me with this flim-flam - are they willingly lying purely for the $$? Have they convinced themselves that the lie is true and are perpetuating some mangled form of honesty? Sad, really..

a reply to: redtic

The book is offered freely, but some of his videos appear to have video ads in front of them which would generate cash for him without anyone knowing.

originally posted by: Saint Exupery

originally posted by: ngchunter
Gill Broussard has been making the rounds on various "alternative media" shows lately, going viral for his theory that a planet 7 times the size and mass of earth...

Well, there's his first screw-up. He must not have been paying attention in high school geometry - that bit about volume going up as the cube of the radius. A globe 7 times the size of the Earth would have 343 times the volume. Assuming the same density as the Earth (5514 kg/m), it would have 343 time the mass. That's more massive than Jupiter.

Maybe it's a lot less dense for some strange reason? I try not to quibble about things where wiggle room is left. Yes, that's probably just from his ignorance of how volume increases with size, or maybe he means 7x the volume, not 7x the radius or diameter. The point is he isn't really specific about what he means, so it's best to avoid trying to pin him on that only for him to escape and then make it look like "he was right all along." There are some things in his book which are flat-out wrong and demonstrate dramatic ignorance, like his chart on page 39 where he shows the planet's increasing brightness and ranks it as "equal in brightness to Venus" at a magnitude of 3.99. That's +3.99, not -3.99 and it's not a typo either because a few days later it hits +3.5 as it continues to increase in brightness at which point he says it will start to be seen from urban neighborhoods. According to this chart it's already naked eye magnitude and somewhere between magnitude 5.8 and 5.6.

Can you please post your 6-line elements and epoch? I'd like to plug them into some software I have. Thanks in advance.

Sure. It's listed in pericentric format in the third picture I posted, view the picture at full size to see it. Here it is again though in text form:
Perihelion Feb 17 2016 - 2457435.5
Semi-major axis: 46.69 AU
Eccentricity: 0.992571
Inclination: 0.02 degrees
Perihelion distance: 0.34686 AU
Argument of perihelion: 81.96 degrees
Longitude of ascending node: 0 degrees

REALLY?!?! So when it came around in 1697, astronomers including Newton, Halley, Flamsteed, Hooke and others somehow missed it. Must've been cloudy... everywhere... for years.

He claims it was seen in Hamburg, Germany during the day on November 4, 1697. Googling it brings me to a plethora of UFO sites containing the same drawing as he shows in his book.
www.ufoevidence.org...
I haven't had time to dig into the provenance of that drawing. In any case it appears he looked for anything unexplained he could find that occurred in the sky in 1697 and chalked it up to his "planet" as proof that it exists even though astronomers never saw it for some reason.

originally posted by: ngchunter
a reply to: redtic

The book is offered freely, but some of his videos appear to have video ads in front of them which would generate cash for him without anyone knowing.

I see. At the risk of learning more than I want to about this guy, I see he also has fictional novels for sale (and he asks for donations on his site), so it's all about priming and pumping the network for $$. Does he *really* believe there's a planet X coming to get us? I honestly don't know, but I suspect not... and I put him up there with the rest of the flim-flam artists like Sylvia Browne, John Edward, etc, etc...

originally posted by: Bobaganoosh
Well done OP. I do follow Planet 7x on YouTube and enjoy the videos. I seldom discuss it here due to people just generally being snarky turds about everything and laying waste to virtually every civilized discussion.

Some of the information presented is fascinating. I mainly watch to see what past accounts of inexplicable astrological observation gets dug up. All of the predictions and expectations I take with a salt block.

I especially enjoyed the presentation on the bronze disk found in Germany in 1999.

See, the problem is you have here a guy who is trying to take disparate and in some cases mysterious phenomenon and chalk it all up to a single unified source, a specific claim of a planet. The Nebra sky disc is interesting enough on its own without having to seek bad information from a planet x theorist. Was it used as a calendar? Does it depict the sun, the moon, or an eclipse? Those are real and interesting questions, and it's better to pursue those questions honestly rather than take in information from someone who only pretends to have the answers so that he can use it as support for his overall theory, which IS about predictions and a particular orbit for a planet.

originally posted by: redtic

originally posted by: ngchunter
a reply to: redtic

The book is offered freely, but some of his videos appear to have video ads in front of them which would generate cash for him without anyone knowing.

I see. At the risk of learning more than I want to about this guy, I see he also has fictional novels for sale (and he asks for donations on his site), so it's all about priming and pumping the network for $$. Does he *really* believe there's a planet X coming to get us? I honestly don't know, but I suspect not... and I put him up there with the rest of the flim-flam artists like Sylvia Browne, John Edward, etc, etc...

He's a hard read for me. Some guys are just blatantly obvious in their deceptions, people like Donny Gilson, Tyler Glockner, Marshall Masters, and others who are fully aware that what they are selling is not the truth. Others like him may actually believe it. Certainly a lot of his background material is religious in nature, but even that can go either way; he might just be using it as a cover to draw support with (highly effective if true, I've even seen youtube pastors citing his work), but on the other hand he may have his own theology based around his claimed planet as being a source for many biblical events.

From the interviews of Gill that I've seen I just can't make a determination either way. Certainly it can serve to bring in at least a little income for him as its currently structured, and more than a little attention and fame among the alternative media community. He doesn't strike me as "dynamic" enough, for lack of a better word, to convince me that he's just putting on a performance for the crowd, but I'm sure he's enjoying the positive attention he's getting from big names in alternative media. Whatever the case, whether he believes in his planet or not, my focus is purely on addressing the claim itself rather than his motivations. I simply can't discern the latter with certainty at this time.

All that for "simply it doesn't exist"!?

You should of started with that.

Planet X is Saturn.

Saturn is very large, Saturn from a frontal-2D view, would appear to have wings. Saturn in dark, minus it's solar light reflection.

Any large body would be seen by now.

originally posted by: Elementalist
All that for "simply it doesn't exist"!?

You should of started with that.

Didn't want to lead off with that; it tends to put believers in the theory (or people prone to believe it) on the defensive right away and causes them to tune out before looking at the evidence presented.

Planet X is Saturn.

Saturn is very large, Saturn from a frontal-2D view, would appear to have wings. Saturn in dark, minus it's solar light reflection.

Any large body would be seen by now.

Planet X in science has a long history but in general it simply means an unknown planet. Pluto was found as a result of a hunt for a planet X. Saturn has been a known planet from antiquity.

I have to say there is an industry that is centuries old which sells doomsday right around the corner. All shapes and sizes.

One of these days I am going to collect rocks and paint them silver and gold and sell them on ebay as "protection" from several doomsday scenarios as well as certain conspiracies.

"Tired of wearing that tinfoil hat because it makes you look like a nut? Purchase my protection from those rays being beamed to your head with my special Galactic Genesis Golden Geode!"

Sad thing is that I bet I would sell a few...

Nibiru never goes away. It just keeps coming back in ever more tricky forms to make it even harder to see ....

originally posted by: AndyMayhew
Nibiru never goes away. It just keeps coming back in ever more tricky forms to make it even harder to see ....

The only tricky way is to be invisible, but it can't be invisible per se, since this guy Broussard has tracked it, or rather, so he says. So, if he can track this big 'object' so can others like NGC who have not seen it, and makes no sense, neither does the described orbit of 300 odd years, which would have been recorded over the whole world in some form or another, not to mention any period before that.

I do follow Mr Broussards videos and a few other 'planet X' sites and find them highly entertaining. That is the thing - if you approach them as science fiction (like the Star Wars movies) they are great.

In fact his detailed theories linking historical recorded events to 'data points' would make a fabulous back story for a movie as the 'facts' were uncovered one by one to get to the big reveal of our impending doom. Throw in a parallel story line on the change in humanity as the realisation of the end begins to dawn and you have a great plot

Maybe we should let Mr Brousaard know that he should put his efforts into writing a script - would be more profitable than his low budget DVD business.

a reply to: UKTruth

I agree that people like him, Hoagland, Haramein, etc. should write some science fiction, or even join forces together for a big sci-fi cinema project. They have a rich imagination, and would earn far more money and popularity than doing what they're doing now, i.e. misleading people and cultivating a personality cult.