Current model of Nibiru debunked?

Now I know there are countless other Nibiru threads, but this one is different, so please hear it out. A friend of mine recently sent me an article from a blog that I found to be very interesting. It describes mass, escape velocity, etc. Now while I am no expert in this field and all the number crunching, I have a basic understanding and this guys numbers don't appear to be too far off. So wasting nomore time, here's what he has to say:

Firstly, though it is said that Nibiru is larger than Jupiter, let us be nice and just say that Nibiru is identical in mass to Jupiter- 1.8986*10^27 kilograms. If it were larger, things would be even worse for the Nibiru proponents.

Second, the mass of the sun is 1.9891*10^30 kilograms.

Now, let us think about how much force this would entail being applied between the sun and Nibiru at the perigee of Nibiru's orbit, which is about 1 AU (150 million km) in distance.

The formula used derive how much force two objects are applying on each other by gravity is F=G([m1*m2]/r^2), where G is the gravitational constant (6.67*10^-11) m^3 * kg^-1 * s^-2).

Below I will omit the units for the sake of clarity. The m^3 and the km cancel to produce kg/s with a difference to the exponents of -3 (in case you read the math below and were looking for the three missing digits).

So, let us plug in the numbers:
F=G([m1m2]/r^2)
F=[6.67*10^-11 * ([1.8986*10^27] * [1.9891*10^30])]/(150,000,
000^2)
F=(2.51896*10^45)/(2.25*10^16)
F=1.1952*10^44 N/s

That's 119520000000000000000000000000000000000000000 Newtons of force every second between Nibiru and the sun at its orbit.

But then you might ask, when objects slingshot around the sun, they move quite quickly, which is how they escape. After all, that is how comets escape, right?

Exactly right. Of course, comets do not have the added burden of being thousands of times the mass of our own planet, but that is exactly how they escape- they reach "escape velocity," or, the speed required to escape a gravity well.

So how fast would an object the size of Nibiru, moving in an elliptical orbit, be required to be traveling in order to escape the sun?

The formula for escape velocity is Vsec=[2*G*M/r]^1/2, or, the square root of [2*G*M/r] where G is the gravitational constant, M is the mass being dealt with, and r is the radius of a circle whose diameter is the distance between the objects.

Our G is 6.67*10^-11.
Our M is extracted from the N-M/kg from the first formula, so, 1.1952*10^44.
Our r is 1/2AU, so about 7.5*10^10 km.

Vsec=[2(6.67*10^-11)*(1.1952*10^44)/(7.5*10^10)]^(1/2)
Vsec=([1.5994*10^34]/[7.5*10^10])^(1/2)
Vsec=(2.2126*10^23)^(1/2)
Vsec=1.487*10^7 km/sec.

This means that Nibiru's escape velocity must be 14,870,000 kilometers per second.

To put this utter absurdity into perspective, this is NEARLY SEVEN TIMES THE SPEED OF LIGHT! If Nibiru were ever travelling even a tiny fraction of that speed, tidal forces would tear it apart. Its wake would vaporize the inner planets. This is ridiculous. Abandon this foolish belief- it is debunked NOW.

So, anyone who has the knowledge in this field I would appreciate confirmation, or perhaps your own calculation of the numbers to see how accurate/far off this person is. If it's more accurate than not then it seems like some of the best evidence for the Nibiru myth.

Ok as there is no room to edit my first post and type this I have to make this reply. I found the blog and there are slight errors.
Link: teapotatheism.blogspot.com...

Now in this part of the blog he states:

Thank you, Ben. You have showed me why Nibiru would need to be traveling a great deal FASTER than I had originally calculated.

He is absolutely right: I misstated the distance of 1 AU (I had billions in my head where I should have had millions). Unfortunately for Ben, because the distance part of the equation is on the bottom side of the division bit of the Vsec formula, this means that I am DECREASING the radius of the circle, so I am INCREASING the necessary escape velocity by three more digits!!

Sorry Ben, that change doesn't mean reducing the final product by a factor of a thousand, it means increasing the pre-root Vsec by three digits. Thanks for editing my work for me, now I know that things are even worse for you than I thought.

Thanks, Ben, you have been VERY effective in showing why the Nibiru superstition is EVEN MORE IMPOSSIBLE!

Now avoiding the grudge match two people seem to be having here, others have made some very intresting posts.
Link: teapotatheism.blogspot.com...

What are you doing!? Science has no place in this debate (joking, of course). The funny thing with this "theory" (I hesitate to even call it a theory because that seemingly gives it an oz. of credibility) is that people start with the claim and then search for evidence supporting the claim. This is not science and this is not how science is done.

The claims made by the Planet X'ers are testable and have been tested and guess what? By all standards it has failed the test. There is no observational evidence, there is no mathematical evidence, there is nothing.

I have been researching this "theory" for the past few weeks because this is the first I have heard of it. One of the major claims is that in 1983 there was a newspaper article claiming that a Jupiter sized object was found by the IRAS. Apparently however, not one of the Planet X'ers had the common sense to ask the two scientists who made the discovery what it was. Well, the good folks over at Bad astronomy did and here's what they found;

IRAS was designed to look in the far-infrared, well past what our eyes see. At the time, no one was really sure what it would find. To everyone's surprise, several bright point sources were found that did not correspond to anything seen on optical images taken of the same areas. In the press conference, the two scientists said that these objects could be almost anything, from a tenth planet in our solar system to distant galaxies.

Guess which it turned out to be? Sure enough, much deeper images were taken, and some of the objects were found to be dense gas clouds in our own Galaxy, while others turned out to be very distant galaxies. In fact, these observations heralded the discovery of a new type of object: Ultra-luminous Infrared Galaxies (ULIRGs). These are galaxies in which there is a burst of stars being born. The cocoons of dust in which the stars are enshrouded generates copious infrared, which is what was detected by IRAS. They published these results in the prestigious Astrophysical Journal, and you can even read it yourself.

He did a nice write up explaining all of the myths associated and also did the correct math (on a separate page, just follow the link of the link below).

click here

There is not one shred of evidence supporting Planet X. Nothing. I don't what else can be done?

Indeed, the IRAS story is a favourite among PXers/Nibiru proponents and use it as "proof" for this object being out there. Other favourites include "perturbations of Neptune", which have been explained, a long time ago I might add. And of course we have Sitchin's writings, but lets not even go there! I myself have been researching this matter since the 2003 date of Nibiru's so-called "fly-by of Earth", made popular by Nancy Lieder and Mark Hazelwood. Phil Plait's article is very good and covers pretty much all aspects surrounding this myth. At the end of the day, when we apply current physics, etc, relating to Nibiru and the so-called "facts" and "hard evidence", we simply come up with nothing, nada, zip. It simply does not and cannot exist in the way these people describe it. For people who say, "you cannot disprove something that hasn't been proven to exist", Is partly correct, but we can disprove it in the sense these people speak of it, their so-called "facts" and "evidence" can be disproved and unfortunately for the Nibiru believers, they can be and have been disproved. You cannot believe in something that breaks fundamental laws, but of course, people continue to do so.

EDIT: People should also take the time to visit the following two articles:
spider.ipac.caltech.edu...

adsbit.harvard.edu...

[edit on 21/5/08 by Agent Venom]

If a flag and a star were sense and logic, this thread has both!
Flagged and starred.
I've been battling with these Nibiru believers for weeks now.
Hopefully this will put an end to a very silly notion.

Very well done. And yet again more 'Nibiru is nonsence' evidence.
We are still yet to see some credible info proving it exists.

I was a fence sitter when I first came here but day by day I am even more convinced it just aint so.

Stars and flags all round...my shout!!

Well, I don't know where this guy came up with that final figure, but that value for the escape velocity of Nibiru from the Sun's gravity well is absolute garbage. The only objects in the Universe that have escape velocities greater than the velocity of light are black holes, and that's at a distance within their event horizons. The escape velocity of Nibiru at perihelion (note that I didn't say "perigee", since this is the closest approach of an object to Earth) would be exactly the same as any other solar orbiting object.

Originally posted by Mogget
The escape velocity of Nibiru at perihelion (note that I didn't say "perigee", since this is the closest approach of an object to Earth) would be exactly the same as any other solar orbiting object.

What about size and it's own gravity influence?
An object without it's own sphere of gravitational influence will have a reduced velocity of escape. I suppose it would depend on wether that influence extended as far as the Suns influence.
As for less mass, I'm not so sure. The larger the mass, the harder it would be for the Sun to stop it, I would think. But at the same time, a much smaller mass would have much less interferance from Sol. It may be that they work out the same, but an object with no mass wouldn't be affected at all, right?
An object with a smaller radius would have an easier time escaping, surely?
Besides, those calculations look like they were derived from an object moving away from the center of gravity in a straight line. Nibiru would be going past the Sun at a distance. That said, as Nibiru is entering the solar system, it will be moving toward the Suns gravity, no matter which direction it is coming from.
I wish I knew an astrophysicist

reply to post by cruzion


actually a body which generates its own gravitational effect will have a HIGHER escape velocity , not lower

Originally posted by Mogget
Well, I don't know where this guy came up with that final figure, but that value for the escape velocity of Nibiru from the Sun's gravity well is absolute garbage. The only objects in the Universe that have escape velocities greater than the velocity of light are black holes, and that's at a distance within their event horizons. The escape velocity of Nibiru at perihelion (note that I didn't say "perigee", since this is the closest approach of an object to Earth) would be exactly the same as any other solar orbiting object.

You see this is why the numbers need confirming one way or the other. As I said I don't have the technical knowledge when it comes to this kind of number crunching.

The escape velocity is wrong because he's used the gravitational force calculated as the mass. It should just be the mass of the Sun, about 2*10^30 kg.

Using this it comes out as about 6 kms^-1, which seems in the right kind of area, looking at the escape velocity at Mercury on wikipedia, and is obviously feasible. This is independent of the mass of the object as the equation comes from equating centripetal and gravitational force (or kinetic and potential energy), which cancels out the terms for mass.

I'd just like to say, though, that I'm not a Planet X believer. I just thought it would be best if I pointed out the mistake before someone else did, who might start using this as 'proof' that us non-believers are wrong.

Ok we're talking about escape velocity here, taking into account Nibiru's so-called mass, orbit, etc. Going by the diagram below which is widely used to show Nibiru's so-called orbit around our sun. Ignoring the fact for a moment that Nibiru is supposed to be a brown dwarf star BIGGER than Jupiter, let's just say it's a planet just like Jupiter, as the guy on the blog has done.



Now with an orbit like this, how fast would this sucker have to be going? Would it crash into the sun? Would it be flung out into space? When we can come up with the right formula and answers, that can be confirmed, we can move onto the "brown dwarf star" scenario.

As the guy states on his blog:

What I have given to the Nibiru people this time is mathematical proof that a planet the size of Nibiru could never escape the gravity well of the sun on its previous passes on an orbit that close.

reply to post by Agent Venom


If Nibiru was in a stable orbit, as it's supposed to be, its mass has no effect on the escape velocity. This is because its kinetic and gravitational potential energies are equal (which is how the escape velocity equation is derived), and as both rely linearly upon the mass of the object these terms are cancelled out.

However, your diagram gave me an idea as to how to check the likelihood of the orbit existing. Kepler's 3rd law says that the square of the period of the orbit is proportional to cube of its semi-major axis (half the longest 'diameter' of the ellipse). This can be used as P^2 = a^3 if P taken in years and a in astronomical units. Taking P = 3600 yrs, this give a as 235 AU.

This can then be used to show the eccentricity of the orbit, using the distance from the sun at its closest approach (perihelion).

d = a(1-e)

Taking the perihelion distance d as 1 AU (I think that's what was used in the original calculation), this rearranges to give an eccentricity of 0.998.

Basically the orbit would have to be almost a straight line, which is very unlikely.

Great thread, Venom.

NASA did a similar debunking case recently. I've posted it on this thread.

I also found this directly from a senior NASA scientist who calls Nibiru a decade-old hoax derived from a cult....

I hope this is my last comment on the Nibiru hoax, but questions like the above six keep coming in. Most of the entries on the Internet about Nibiru are false. Wikipedia has it correct when they write that "Nibiru is a name in Sumerian, Babylonian astrology associated with the god Marduk, generally accepted as referring to the planet Jupiter." The rest is a hoax, including all the "stuff" questioner #! found on the internet. Questioners #2 and #3 mention the astronomical observatory at the South Pole, but I assure you these astronomers are not looking at Nibiru. The Antarctic is a great place for astronomical infrared and short-wave-radio observations, and it also has the advantage that objects can be observed continuously without the interference of the day-night cycle. If the questioner really thinks that Nibiru is visible in the daytime in the southern hemisphere, they are very confused; this sort of statement is obviously false. Questioners #3 and #4 seem to think that the government would hide information about Nibiru and the catastrophe supposedly due in a few years, but I can't imagine why. My experience is, in fact, that sometimes parts of the government do just the opposite, as in the frequent references to various terrorist threats or warnings about driving accidents on long holiday weekends, which are no more dangerous than any other time. In any case, the job of NASA scientists is to discover and tell the truth! Questioner (5) asks if Nibiru is the same as Eris, and the answer is an emphatic no. This Nibiru hoax has been around for a decade, including predictions that Nibiru would pass close to Earth and cause a catastrophe about 5 years ago. (Guess what: it didn't happen!). Eris, in contrast, is one of several dwarf planets recently found by astronomers in the outer part of out solar system, all of them on normal orbits that will never bring them close to Earth. There is a good write-up on Eris in Wikipedia. Finally, Questioner (6) asks me to identify two pictures. I could perhaps do so if I knew the type of telescope and camera used and the scale of photos. Without that information, I can only guess that (if these photos are real) these might be images of a gas cloud (nebula) ejected by a star in its old age. They are obviously very distant, since we see stars in the foreground superposed on the nebula. Also, since the stars are the same, this object (if it is real) has not moved between the dates of the two photos. It is just crazy that anyone would claim that these are photos of a planet in our own solar system. Let me say once again that Nibiru is a hoax promoted by a cult; it does not exist, and it certainly poses no threat to us. It saddens me that people would be taken in by such nonsense. David Morrison
NAI Senior Scientist
February 7, 2008

[edit on 5/22/2008 by behindthescenes]

Nibiru IS Jupiter. It's the name the astronomers of the time, gave to a position in the sky that Jupiter had during the course of its transit. If I'm understanding this correctly, it would be the exact point where it crossed over from one half of the sky to the other, like a solstic or equinox, but in this case, referring to the planet Jupiter. It means "crossing" and was used specifically in babylonian astronomy texts to refer to that point in time when Jupiter was nibiru (crossing).

Originally posted by undo
Nibiru IS Jupiter. It's the name the astronomers of the time, gave to a position in the sky that Jupiter had during the course of its transit. If I'm understanding this correctly, it would be the exact point where it crossed over from one half of the sky to the other, like a solstic or equinox, but in this case, referring to the planet Jupiter. It means "crossing" and was used specifically in babylonian astronomy texts to refer to that point in time when Jupiter was nibiru (crossing).

I agree it is widely believed that Nibiru is Jupiter. It had multiple meanings and even in other languages. It was Zecharia Sitchin who messed around with them to prop up his theories. “Nibiru” (more technically and properly transliterated as “neberu”) can mean several things: “place of crossing” or “crossing fee”, “ferry, ford”; “ferry boat”; “(act of) ferrying”

Source

[edit on 22/5/08 by Agent Venom]

Yes, Enlil had a city in ancient Sumer called NIBRU (Without the second "I"). It was called that because it was a spot on the Euphrates where people could cross over to the other side. It also meant "gate" as does "NIBIRU". Today that city is known as Nippur (the etymology: nibru, nibbur, nippur)

Sitchin's belief that it was another planet other than jupiter, was from a cylinder seal that depicted a star and some (planets?), but he refuses to acknowledge that the symbol for star is not the same as the symbol for sun. Even though WE know the sun is a star, the sumerians differentiated between them and had 2 different symbols. In effect, what he calls our solar system, is in fact a star and planets but not the sun and solar system planets. The symbol is the star symbol not the sun symbol. I'm not sure why he insists on saying it's the sun.



[edit on 22-5-2008 by undo]

You're referring to cylinder seal VA 243, correct? Picture below.



Many people believe this depicts our solar system, and it is totally incorrect. As you stated, the central object is not the Sumerian and Mesopotamian symbol for the Sun, but a star symbol. I already pointed this out on other thread Here

A more in-depth understanding of this particular seal can be found Here

Yep. Now if he had said that every 3000+ years, Jupiter goes wacko and messes with the solar system, I'd be more inclined to believe him.

Originally posted by undo
Yep. Now if he had said that every 3000+ years, Jupiter goes wacko and messes with the solar system, I'd be more inclined to believe him.

Sitchin, and others, also believe the Sumerians had knowledge of ALL the planets in the solar system, this again is a total fabrication. They did NOT have knowledge of the planets that lay beyond Saturn, namely Uranus, Neptune and Pluto but of course, Sitchin claims they did. There is no evidence whatsoever that they had knowledge of these planets apart from Sitchin's writings. Again as I pointed out in another thread:

The Sumerians did not have telescopes, and only knew of 5 planets (7 if one counts the sun and moon), Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn. They did not know of Uranus, Neptune or Pluto as Sitchin claims. Of the planets that lay beyond Saturn (namely, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto) the ancients show no sign of having been aware of them. Uranus was only discovered and named in the post-telescope era by William Herschel in 1781. That goes doubly for Neptune or Pluto that lay beyond Uranus, and were discovered much later. None of those three planets show up on any known pre-Galilean sky charts.