I first wrote this after a recent particularly silly story about Nibiru, published in the Daily Telegraph: The end of the world now predicted for December say doomsday groups: "Terrifying stuff. Apparently, the planet due to collide with us is often visible, you may have seen it already. If you spot a blob next to the sun when you take a photograph, it could be the deadly planet, not a reflection."

It is not written entirely seriously in tone I think. Still humour is easy for some readers to miss in print, and some people take all of this very seriously. I wrote this originally as a short debunking article, to reassure anyone who is concerned about Nibiru. I got so many comments there from some very scared people, who still needed a lot of reassuring that it was indeed a hoax and not real. So, I thought I'd expand it into a longer article, and a kindle booklet, and add an FAQ. So here we go.

First, considered as astronomy, it is too nonsensical to be classified as a theory. There are no astronomers behind it, no academic papers, no nothing. The so called "Nibiru observations" wouldn't  pass muster for the very first stage of an unconfirmed sighting. 

There is no information there you could use to prepare an alert to send out to other astronomers to get them to look out for it. If you come to it with an astronomical background, there is nothing there at all except a lot of chattering people, smokes and mirrors, and people quoting texts from various ancient scriptures - apparently under the impression that this an accurate way to predict motions of planets in astrophysics.

And the things they say show a total lack of understanding of the most basic ideas in astronomy. It is not even "not even wrong". For an astronomer,  it is too nonsensical to even understand what it would mean for it to be right or wrong. Just a "bullshit planet" as Brian Cox colourfully put it.

Brian Cox who colourfully called Nibiru  "the imaginary bullshit planet"

Neil deGrasse Tyson who called it "A marvelous work of fiction" by people who flunked physics at high school.

Here is Brian Cox's tweet about Nibiru. 

If anyone else asks me about "Nibiru" the imaginary bullshit planet I will slap them around their irrational heads with Newton's Principia" - tweet by Brian Cox

Professional astronomers are totally fed up with people asking them about what he calls "this imaginary bullshit planet" :).

Here is Neil deGrasse Tyson - this is about the earlier scare in 2012 because this isn't by any means the first time this pesky planet has tried to buzz the Earth according to those who believe in it.

I think it is sad that so many people are so upset about something like this. When there are many real things that are worth worrying about. Such as climate change, extinction of species, and indeed for that matter asteroid impacts, by the very real asteroids. Most of these are very small, we are far more likely to predict a 100 meter or smaller one - but that's still large enough to be very bad news for a country. The difference is we know what these are and can do something about them.

So, I'll talk a little about the very real asteroid threats that we should be concerned about, and the amazing progress that astronomers have made already detecting them, and what they could do with enough funding.

Amateur astronomers can spot Pluto, with a ten inch telescope. That's not a particularly big one.

This telescope is large enough to spot Pluto, at a distance of 7.5 billion kilometers. That's nearly forty times the distance from Earth to the sun. Pluto's is smaller than our moon, diameter only 2,372 km. How to Scope Out Pluto in the Night Sky Friday

There may be undiscovered large planets in our solar system, maybe as large as Mars, even Earth. But to remain hidden, even from a ten inch amateur scope, they would have to be many times the distance to Pluto away, in the very distant Oort cloud - where it's thought there's a vast population of icy bodies of many sizes stretching much of the way to the nearest stars. 

Asteroids are detected nowadays by medium sized professional telescope, with by far the most capable currently, Pan-STARRS. Here is a photo with some people beside it to show the scale.

Here it is with one of its images photoshopped into the sky

It takes two 1.4 gigapixel images every minute, all night, every night, looking for asteroids. It is optimized for this hunt, with a high sensitivity very wide field, and with a Schmidt Cassegrain construction which means that the images are crisp and clear, without any distortion, right to the edges of its wide field of view.

And - it is not operated by NASA. It is true that it is under the auspices of the Hawaii university, and that Hawaii became the fiftieth state of the USA in 1959. But it is managed by the PS1 Science Consortium consisting of ten institutions from four countries. 

So if you think there is a conspiracy hiding Nibiru - then all of those institutions would have to be in on it.

But not only that, also all amateur astronomers world wide with telescopes of ten inches or more would have to be in on it also. It's just totally silly and absurd.

Pan-STARRS is doing a great job of finding asteroids. We have already found ALL THE ASTEROIDS OF TEN KILOMETERS IN DIAMETER OR LARGER right out to Jupiter. So not even a New York sized asteroid could be hiding there, never mind a planet. Also, we've found 90% of the next size down, the one kilometer asteroids, and Pan-STARRS finds a new one of those on average, every month. They expect to reach 99% coverage of Near Earth Object (NEO) one kilometer asteroids by the 2020s.

Nowadays amateurs don't have a chance of finding a new asteroid, and they have given up trying. Never mind spotting a new planet or star by photographing the sun :). Instead they do the follow up observations, where they are very much needed. With thousands of asteroids to follow, the professional telescopes can't keep up.

With the ten kilometers search already complete out to Jupiter, that only leaves comets, and Jupiter orbit crossing asteroids, which makes it an estimated perhaps less than one in ten million chance that we get hit by one of those in the next century. I.e. 99.99999% certain that we don't get hit by anything as big as ten kilometers in the next century. Many blockbuster movie goers would guess it is perhaps a 50% chance, I'd imagine :).

Also if one of those big ones was headed our way,  as big as the asteroid that ended the dinosaur era, we'd be likely to have a couple of decades warning before it got close to Earth, because it would have to be out beyond Jupiter to still be hidden from view. 

Now the asteroid threat is significant. But with all the largest ones found and most of the next size down going to be found in the next decade, the ones we need to worry about now are the smaller ones. A 100 meter asteroid hitting Earth in the wrong place could be very bad news indeed for an entire small country. Here is Brian May, astrophysicist, and also guitarist and founding member of Queen talking about the effect of a 100 meter asteroid if it hit London.

All this doom saying Nibiru and other similar Armageddon nonsense is distracting people from a real threat, which we can actually do something about what's more. We can predict, evacuate if necessary - but if we discover them a couple of decades in advance, we can deflect them also, relatively easily. So detection is the priority at present.

Astronomers know how to detect them also; that's not the problem. The issue is funding.

Our super sensitive Earth based optical telescopes can't look in the direction of the sun - as they can't operate in daylight. So, if a small meteorite approaches Earth pretty much directly from the direction of the sun, we can't see it until it hits, or a little before, as it enters the atmosphere.

That's why nobody spotted the Russian Chelyabinsk meteor. If it had come from any other direction, they'd have had at least quite a few hours of warning, maybe as much as a day or two. But it came almost directly from the direction of the sun.

We can fix this with a space telescope. The B612 foundation has one designed, which they could launch by 2019 if they had the funding. It would find nearly every NEO of 20 meters diameter upwards quickly, within six and a half years. That means nearly all the significant threats as smaller asteroids than that break up in the atmosphere as shooting stars and bright fireballs.

It would orbit close to Venus, looking outwards towards Earth's orbit, in the infrared, which makes it very easy to spot tiny asteroids, and also those hard to detect asteroids that spend most of their time in our daytime sky between Venus and Earth.

And the total cost is $450 million Asteroid Hunt: Private Groups Join Search for Dangerous Space Rocks. Governments often sign off checks far larger than that.

But they are struggling to raise enough funding, as they get no government funding at all, just partnership support from NASA and rely on private donations. They got less than a tenth of what they needed from donations.

NASA was never going to fund it, just provide support. But it has dropped this support now because of the funding gap. NASA drops partnership with private asteroid hunt. 

NASA might possibly fund the less capable and lower cost Near-Earth Object Camera which, as the plans go, will be positioned at the L1 position between Earth and sun instead of an orbit close to Venus. This will help with asteroids of 140 meters diameter or larger. It is competing with other non asteroid related projects, so I wouldn't pin our hopes on it quite yet. And though certainly a major step forward, it won't find the more numerous, and still very dangerous, 100 meter diameter or smaller asteroids.

Sentinel is still continuing as a project without NASA support. By comparison to this $450 million figure for Sentinel, the NASA budget for the ISS in 2015 was three billion dollars.

And a new destroyer costs getting on for $2 billion Arleigh Burke-class destroyer

And the totally useless (in my view) nuclear weapon carrying Trident submarines, will cost the UK government $100 billion. No to Trident

For that, we could fund Sentinel 200 times over, and still have some change. I'm not sure we have our priorities right here. 

The price is also low enough so that a private investor, if some multi-billionaire took an interest in the project, could fund the whole thing.

But anyway to summarize: Nibiru is just silly. 

For more on asteroid detection see  Is it true that an asteroid will strike earth on [Insert Date Here]?

I've also written up some of these posts as a kindle book:

Giant Asteroid Is Headed Your Way? - How We Can Detect and Deflect Them (Amazon kindle) which is also available to read online for free at Giant Asteroid Headed Your Way? - How We Can Detect And Deflect Them

That was as far as I got with my original post about Nibiru (updated a bit here), but many people still needed a lot of reassuring and they had many questions about it.

So let's look more closely at some of these questions. I'll start with the hoaxes and fakes, and then go onto the more genuine "observations"

I haven't used their original questions as stated - you can read them in the comment thread to the previous article. Rather, this is in the form of an FAQ, loosely based on the actual questions people have already asked, with a few extra questions added to help with the flow.

WHY DO SO MANY PEOPLE BELIEVE THIS IF IT ISN'T TRUE?

It's a hoax or a misunderstanding. Often lots of people do believe hoaxes. One of the most famous is the Spaghetti harvest April Fool in 1957.

Back then we didn't have the internet and many people believed this hoax, especially as it was narrated by a very respected presenter in the UK, Richard Dimbleby, as respected in the UK as, say, David Attenborough is today. Also spaghetti wasn't nearly as common or as easy to get hold of in Britain as it is today, and back in the 1950s many people in Britain simply weren't aware that spaghetti is made from pasta.  It was so convincing, some people phoned in asking where they could buy spaghetti bushes to grow this exotic delicacy in greenhouses, and eat it fresh themselves, as in the video.  For more on it see 1957: BBC fools the nation.

So, it wouldn't be surprising at all if some at least of the "Nibiru videos" are fake, or enhanced, because with modern technology such fakery is very easy to do. There are many internet hoaxers out there, who do this sort of thing either for fun, or to advertise a product or a movie, or just for the ad revenue on the video. They may get a significant income from ads if they can make a video that gets shown to millions of people.

This is an example of a well known recent internet hoax which fooled a lot of people.

The person in the video has never even flown in a wingsuit, as he later admitted.

This is about how it was faked

And the whole thing was done just for the product placement in the shower scene part of the way through.

HOAX IMAGES AND VIDEOS OF NIBIRU DONE AS A PRANK

With all this nonsense about Nibiru, some people have done what they intended to be harmless pranks, just to have their videos and images propogated all over the internet as real.

Dramatic Chipmunk :)

PROFESSOR KAPLAN - MURDERED UNDER MYSTERIOUS CIRCUMSTANCES WHILE OBSERVING NIBIRU - PERHAPS ABDUCTED BY ALIENS

If you read the conspiracy stories about Nibiru, you've probably heard of the mysterious kidnapped and murdered Professor Kaplan, and the chip with a recording of his observations of Nibiru which was found by someone and uploaded to youtube.

Here "Professor Kaplan" talks about why he did this hoax video originally as a silly prank for his pals, and his attempts to get it taken down - which only fueled more conspiracy theories about the video.

As he says, he isn't actually a professor, he's an astrophysics student doing a doctorate and has to wait for fifteen minutes for long exposures at his observatory. He dd it as a joke during one of those long waits twiddling his thumbs with nothing to do. So he wasn't wasting precious observatory time or his own time when he did it. It looks very authentic because it is not a set, it is recorded at an actual observatory. But he didn't do it for youtube or for public viewing.

He left two clues that it is a joke in the video including an email allegedly from someone else shown as addressed from "Me" to "Me" in a close up shot, and a quiet chuckle at the end of the video as he gets "abducted". Plus of course him being still alive and giving a skype interview after the joke "alien abduction" at the end shows it is a joke :)

HOAX IMAGE

This is an early hoax image from 2003, very rudimentary. The tiny white dot is supposed to be Nibiru.

The author of it - or at least someone claiming to be the author - posted to forums soon after saying it was a hoax. But many didn't believe him and it is still available online as an alleged photo of Nibiru.

I'm not sure which of the more recent photos and videos are fake, but surely some of them must be. Or digitally enhanced to make it look more like a second sun or planet.

ARTIST'S IMPRESSION USED AS A PHOTOGRAPH.

This rather dramatic image has gone the rounds a bit and been posted as a photograph of a double sunset in China. There was indeed a double sunset in China as we'll see, but this is not it. It's actually an artist's impression from NASA of a double sunset over an alien star.

DEBUNKING SOME POPULAR ARTICLES AND VIDEOS

In the comments to my last article I was asked to debunk a popular article and a video, about Nibiru. Obviously I can't debunk them all, that would take for ever and make this article unbearably long. But perhaps a couple of debunks will help.

Do bear in mind, that I'm sure if I were, say, to write an article about football or rugby, I'd make at least as many mistakes as these authors do, when writing about astronomy. It would probably be a silly article indeed, full of misunderstandings - I'm just not very into those sports and haven't got a grasp of the rules of the game and don't know the names of he teams or players. So it's like that the other way around, when these people talk about astronomy.

DEBUNKING "Planet X - Nibiru Discovered Orbiting A Brown Dwarf Star 2015- Binary Solar System" 

This video is about Tyche. Notice that the news casts are all a bit old fashioned in style? Tyche was proposed in 1999 to explain certain patterns in the orbits of comets - but was proved not to exist in 2014 using results from an ultrasensitive infrared telescope called WISE.

Artist's impression of the NASA Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer which proved that Nibiru and Tyche can't exist in results published in 2014 using data collected in 2010 to 2011.

It was an all sky survey and has ruled out the possibility of a Saturn sized object out to 10,000 times the Earth - Sun distance, and a Jupiter size or larger object out to 26,000 times that distance. (I.e. 26,000 AU.)

In this video, they seem to confuse this with Nemesis - a hypothesized second star which could have lead to excess comets every 26 million years or so if it existed. Tyche was actually given a new name in order to try to avoid confusion with Nemesis since the authors didn't think it caused excess comets.

In any case for Nemesis, the idea was an excess of comets, not now, but millions of years in the past, and then again, millions of years in the future. But anyway, it is a completely different hypothesis from Tyche.

There have been many searches for Nemesis which have never turned up anything. It was finally conclusively proved not to exist by that same WISE survey that disproved Tyche. It turned up new brown dwarf stars many light years from Earth, and as a result of this ultra sensitive search, it doesn't seem that our sun can have a companion star or brown dwarf at all, though until around 2014 or so you could still suppose that it did.

There is no way that there could be a new red dwarf star 15 au from the sun as they say in the video. That's closer than both Uranus and Neptune (19.2 and 30.1 au respectively). 

And you do see red dwarfs through an ordinary telescope. They are just fainter than most stars. None are easily visible to the naked eye, but that is because they are so far away. The brightest red dwarf is Lacaille 8760 which is magnitude 6.67. I don't know if anyone has done it - but at that brightness it might just be visible to a keen eyed observer from a very dark site. 

But that's because it is 1.9 light years away. The closest red dwarf is Proxima Centauri. which is also the closest star known to Earth. It is visible through small telescopes.

Red dwarf stars are just stars, at quite a hot temperature of a few thousand degrees - 3,800 K for instance for Lacaille 8760. Hotter than a potter's kiln..

He was probably thinking about brown dwarfs. Those are on the borderline between planets like Jupiter and red dwarfs. They don't shine by their own light like a star but are large enough to have a tiny bit of nuclear fusion at some point at least in the early stages of their formation.

They are not at all invisible, but when they are far away from any other star, then they don't emit any light themselves so are black in visible light. They are however warm-ish  (-100 C or so, but warmer than than the cosmic and intergalactic background), still retaining the heat of formation and early fusion. So, they search for them with infrared telescopes.

Bring a brown dwarf close to a star and it will shine by reflected light in the same way Jupiter does, depending on their albedo. Some may be very dark in the visible wavelengths, but they'd still be easy enough to see by reflected light. For instance the Moon is actually as dark as asphalt but looks bright because we see it illuminated by full sunlight against a dark sky. 

All brown dwarfs are about the same size as Jupiter, incidentally, however heavy they are - a remarkable property. As they get heavier they also collapse on themselves a bit so don't get much larger.

Anyway WISE has already ruled those out also. It can detect them out to around 10 light years away, and has found some new brown dwarfs, but none close to our sun. Incidentally it has now been re-activated as NEOWISE and is searching for Near Earth Objects, where it is especially useful for finding dark ones that are harder to spot from the ground but just as visible in infrared as the bright ones.

The name Planet X was not invented by NASA, as they say in the video. Instead, it goes back to Percival Lovell in 1905 and the phrase is used nowadays as a general term to describe a planet you are searching for which you haven't yet proved exists. So if an astronomer, or NASA talks about a Planet X that is a short hand to say that they don't  know if it exists yet. The very fact that they called it Planet X means they didn't have evidence yet that it existed.

That's all in the first five minutes of the video. I am only an eighth of the way through it and if I debunk everything he says this will surely take very long. I haven't yet come across a single correct statement in it I think. Well about astronomy anyway :).

I've also copied this debunk of it to the video comments here.

DEBUNKING "THE SCIENTIFIC CASE FOR NIBIRU"

The article is here: Is life as we know it going to end? The scientific case for Nibiru/Planet X that will not go away

There are loads of elementary mistakes in astronomy on that page. And biology too. 

INTERBREEDING WITH HUMANS

What's the chance that some independently evolved species of aliens living on an extrasolar planet could interbreed with humans? This is a common theme of science fiction movies but it makes no scientific sense. Just a fun movie trope.

Do you know of any other species on the Earth that can interbreed with humans? Would you expect a lemur from Madagascar to interbreed with a Koala bear from Australia and have viable children? Or an Orang Utan from Indonesia to interbreed with a mountain Gorilla from Africa?

Why would creatures evolved around another planet, which probably don't even have DNA as we do, be able to interbreed with us? 

It is a very common movie trope, which is probably where they got the idea. See Half-Human Hybrid Movie Trope. As soon as you see something like this, you think "this is someone who gets their ideas of science from the movies".

ANOMALIES IN NEPTUNE'S ORBIT

Picking out a few more points from this page. Yes the search for Pluto was indeed done by looking at perturbations of Neptune's orbit. And yes scientists for a long time wondered if there are more planets out there to explain these perturbations, as Pluto is not big enough. This speculation ended in 1993 when E Myles Standish used data from Voyager 2's 1989 flyby of Neptune to revise its mass. With this new revised mass, then the discrepancies disappeared. 

Nowadays all our spacecraft are able to navigate through the solar system very precisely using models which only need to include the known planets, with no need for a hypothesis of a planet X. And our asteroid predictions and everything work just fine without it.

So this is no longer an anomaly, and no longer thought to be evidence for planet X. So what they say there is 32 years out of date.

There is still interest in the idea of a planet X. Nowadays the main evidence is

• Many dwarf planets similar in size to Pluto are now known. And Eris is even slightly larger, though further away.

  So - when you have a large population of small objects like this way out there in the solar system, it seems likely that there are some larger objects as well. That's just because the search is incomplete, and there are no physical reasons for a fixed upper bound on their size. So statistically you'd expect to have some even  larger not yet discovered objects further away so harder to spot. I think most would expect to find some at least larger than Eris - as it is very unlikely we have already found the largest of them all as they get much harder to spot the further you go from the sun. The main question is just, how large do they get?

• The Kuiper cliff. There's a sudden drop in numbers of dwarf planets when you'd expect the numbers to increase due to larger volume surveyed. That lead to various ideas but one suggestion is that this could be due to the effect of a larger planet X. It might be a similar phenomenon to Saturn's rings, where many of the rings have sharp edges due to "shepherd moonlets" just outside of the rings that keep them in place.

But if this planet does exist, the idea is that it orbits permanently well beyond Pluto in order to create this Kuiper cliff - so far away it's hard to detect. It's nothing like the ideas of Nibiru.

MANY STARS ARE BINARY SYSTEMS

Going back to the page I'm debunking - yes many stars are binary systems. Perhaps as many as 80%. But with 80% of stars binary, that still leaves 20% not binary. And many binary stars would be very difficult places for an Earth like habitable planet to form. Systems with a star orbiting another with a highly elliptical orbit like the ideas for Nemesis would be amongst the most unstable, with very few stable planets. It's much less likely that a planet like Earth would form in such a system.

Add Nibiru - or even more so, Nibiru orbiting Nemisis - to our system and make it swing through the inner solar system every 3,600 years and our planets would not remain stable for long. We just wouldn't be here.

DEBRIS FROM THE ASTEROID BELT - MORE AT SOME TIMES THAN OTHERS

Then, yes we do get lots of debris from the asteroid belt pass close by to Earth. But that's nothing new. The only new thing is we've got better at detecting it.

Yes they are right that sometimes there is more than at other times. But that's over periods of many millions or even billions of years. It may be due to a close flyby of another star - passing us way out beyond Pluto. Or it could be that some big comet, really huge, comes into the inner solar system just through interactions with other comets. That's likely to happen from time to time.

It's not at all likely to hit Earth or any of the other tiny planets,. But Jupiter is a big target and it could get disrupted by Jupiter, break into lots of pieces, and could lead to more comets than usual in vicinity of Earth and hitting it.

APPROACH OVER THOUSANDS OF YEARS

All of that is true. Except - that the star would be approaching us slowly for many thousands of years. We'd spot it in our telescopes and predict it many millennia in advance. It's the same also for the idea of a large object coming into the inner solar system and interacting with Jupiter, breaking up, and sending more comets towards Earth. This is something that would gradually unfold over thousands and tens of thousands of years. Not just in a month or a decade.

SEARCHES FOR NEMESIS - WHAT THEY LEFT OUT

Yes again it is true that there have been many searches for Nemesis - a hypothetical red dwarf or brown dwarf in the outer solar system. What they leave out there is that

•  None of these searches have turned up anything yet, as we've already seen.
  They  link to a story written before the WISE search started but don't mention the conclusions of the search. Very selective reporting - or they just don't know about what happened next in which case it means they don't know how to search for information like this, which is easy to find.
   
• The original Nemesis searches were motivated by the idea of a star that sends more comets to hit Earth over a 26 million year cycle. There is no way that it could have a 3,600 year orbit.

I'm not sure I need to go on. Again as with the last one, I could go through debunking the whole thing, but perhaps have better things to do? :)

SO WHAT ABOUT ALL THE "OBSERVATIONS"?

This video was top in the search results for Nibiru on youtube when I wrote this article.

Whatever this is, it can't be a planet, or a second sun, as, to travel so quickly across the sky, it would need to travel faster than light (light takes eight minutes to get from the sun to Earth) and also it needs to be seen in different places in the solar system depending on where you are on Earth. 

With photos of wildlife, if you spot a rare animal or bird in Peru, say, the only way to check it is for someone else to go out to Peru to look for it.

But here,  sunrise and sunset of course happens at different times in different parts of the world. How could a planet be visible next to the sun in China, say, at the rising or setting sun, and yet not be visible in the US, say, at the same time.

So, if it's not a star or planet, what is it that all these people video, and photograph?

LENS FLARES

Many of those who say they've seen Nibiru for themselves have probably taken photographs. By "seeing it" they mean they've seen it in a photograph they took, say on their smart phone etc. Perhaps pointed it at the sun and then looked at the screen to see the sun.

That is by far the beset way to do it as it is dangerous to stare at a bright sun (it can damage your eyes). If you do that, you often see lens flares like this

Lens flare (wikipedia)

Images like these all look like lens flares:

So many of these may be lens flares or other effects that happen inside of the optics of the camera itself.

SUN MIRAGES

The other main suggestion (apart from hoaxes) is that some of the photos show rare sun mirage effects, due to refraction of light, like the mirages you get in deserts, or the appearance of wetness on a dry road. 

There are probably many more people right now looking for Nibiru than there are scientists doing research into atmospheric phenomena, so it's not too surprising if they turn up some phenomena that are not yet well studied by scientists. 

Any year if thousands of people were to look out for strange lights near the sun, they'd probably turn up just as many videos of strange lights as they did this year. But usually nobody does this. So this year is probably just the same as any other year. Same also for earlier years when people were looking for Nibiru.

This is one of the more interesting recent "Nibiru" video observations.

So, what can it be? It doesn't look like a lens flare as she zooms right into it, and it just magnifies in place like a real object. A lens flare wouldn't do that. And it is very bright for a lens flare.

Sun mirages are usually above or below the sun like this, rarely at an angle:

Different shapes of the setting sun.

Complex mock mirage sunset photographed in San Francisco

Or you get sun dogs - they are usually at the same altitude as the sun. 

Sun dog photographed in Germany

Left hand sun dog at Stonehenge

These are clear enough and bright enough - but they are in the wrong position relative to the sun.

But rarely you get apparitions of the sun in other positions. They are very rare. But there are many people out photographing what they think is Nibiru. 

So - well this is just a guess for her video, would need experts to look at it - but  perhaps it is this rare and not very well studied or understood atmospheric phenomenon because it is so rare, causing a mirage of the sun at an angle from it.

 Mirages can do very weird things sometimes, like this mirage of a floating city in  China

See China's mysterious floating city and the science of mirages.

This is an earlier double sun image - from China again. Her video reminds me of this.

“The double sun image is an effect of optical refraction, but it’s a pretty darn rare one, and one not fully explained by science… I doubt it’s been computer modeled. There must have been some blob of atmosphere somewhere that caused this truly spectacular phenomenon, which in a sense is a mirage,”quote from Jim Kaler, University of Illinois astronomer.

It turns out, similar things have been seen before. 

"Double and multiple images of the sun and the moon

"Earlier editions of this book mentioned observations of multiple crescents of the moon that were remarkably clear and undisturbed. See Fig 62. 

The distance between these was so greaet that I did not dare to think of a mirage, but rather of a distortion in the eye of the observer. But I was wrong! Nature continually proves to be richer in possibilities than we imagine. A similar phenomenon was seen: beside and above the sun appeared no fewer than seven images of the sun, clear and undistorted. And this time they were photographed, clearly and unambiguously. The sun was about 2 degrees above the horizon at sea and the phenomenon lasted about three minutes. The images were bluish while the real sun was bright orange.

"Furthermore so many other instances have been reported that there is no longer any doubt about:

...

"(c) multiple suns shifted randomly with respect to each other...

Page 60, Light and Color in the Outdoors, by Marcel Minnaert, 1995

 I'm no expert, just throwing this out. Seems at least possible because her "second sun" is the same diameter as the Moon and so same diameter as the sun (the sun is far smaller than it appears in her video because the image smears out because it is so bright).

Maybe others have ideas about what she saw. 

But whatever it was, it was local to where she was, as nothing turned up in the SOHO images of the sun.

CHECKING FOR YOURSELF WITH A LIVE VIEW OF THE SUN FROM SPACE

You can keep an eye on the sun 24/7 yourself if you like. Just visit the SOHO site, here, and you can watch a large area around the sun. This image shows the region around the sun right out to half the distance to Mercury and nearly a sixth of the distance to earth. 

LASCO image, SOHO. View extends outwards to about 32 solar (or lunar) radii so that's about  8 degrees of the sky, total field of view about 16 degrees. By comparison the moon spans about half a degree in the sky.

Live view here The sun is blocked out in the center - where you see that white circle, that's the outline of the sun.

This will show anything that goes close to the sun. Never shows any second suns, or undiscovered planets. 

True the center area around the disk is blocked out, but as you watch comets pass it by you'll soon realize that an incoming object never stays close to the sun for long before it heads out again. And that works in reverse also - an object that comes out from near the sun - unless it formed there (e.g. giant solar flare) must have come in first. 

It's actually not just a tool for professionals. There is so much data streaming in from our satellites in space, that professionals can't keep up with it all. With SOHO especially, amateur astronomers play an important role. For instance in 2005,  Toni Scarmato, a high school teacher from San Costantino di Briatico, Calabria, Italy, discovered SOHO's 999th and 1000th comet

The sun itself is blocked out, because direct light from the sun would damage the instrument. The position of the sun behind the occultor is marked with a white circle.

As you can see - it looks constantly at a huge area of the sky around the sun. There are no unknown planets there, or unknown second suns. Often you see comets - which are invisible in the daytime sky to naked eye - these are the "sun grazers". 

Sometimes they look like bright stars like the one in this video (you may miss it at first - it starts off quite faint coming in from about the one o'clock position then brightens as it passes the sun as they often do, exits just above the nine o'clock position)

And sometimes you see big comets pass by - this is Comet Hyakukte in 1996

The nucleus of a comet is icy and small, just a few kilometers in diameter, 4.8 km in the case of this one. Yet they develop big tails of thin gas and dust, because the sun vaporizes them. With their tails they can become far larger than the sun at times. They are harmless unless the nucleus itself does a direct hit on Earth - and most are not even in the plane of Earth's orbit.

Sometimes the comets are almost invisible on their approach to the sun and most noticeable on the way out - but that's because they are so very tiny. Without their clouds of dust and gas, you wouldn't see them at all at that distance.

So, whatever it was in that video, it can't possibly be a second sun physically in the sky, as that would make it hundreds of thousands of kilometers in diameter  (the sun is around 1.4 million kilometers in diameter). How could it be invisible to everyone else including our best solar telescope in space which looks at a large area around the sun 24/7.

This shows Jupiter compared to the sun, so you can see how big it would have to be, to be a second sun. 

See the Sun - How far - how big.

And if it was a planet rather than a sun, then to be visible like that by reflected light, it needs to be a planet on the far side of the sun,.With its angular diameter roughly the same as the sun, that makes it if anything, larger than the sun. Or if it was even further away, even larger. That's not credible.

So whatever it is, we need some more local explanation. I've just commented on her video, hope it helps. 

If anyone spots something like this again I'm sure it would help atmospheric scientists / astronomers figure out what it is if they take more images showing how it forms, and how it disappears. After all - later in the day or on other days presumably it wasn't there - so what happened in between? Did it just fade away - or what happened? And how long did this phenomenon last? 

Assuming this is a real video, not faked,  and I have no reason to suppose it is a hoax - then this Nibiru thing is at least getting people interested in solar phenomena and with so many eyes looking at the sun that wouldn't normally, it's turning up some interesting solar phenomena.

SAFETY WARNING FOR SUN OBSERVATION

If anyone tries to watch the sun as a result of reading this - please follow basic sun safety.

Your eyes are easily damaged. Many people including some astronomers have had their eyes permanently damaged as a result of looking at the sun - especially through telescopes.

We have no way to sense the effect of the solar radiation on our retina, and the central part of your retina can be damaged beyond recovery, and you won't feel anything. And you don't lose your vision immediately. This happens gradually over the next day or two. And then it sometimes recovers in some people but often it doesn't. 

It's the UV light more than the infra red apparently, and it can go through clouds too. So even when it is quite dim it may not be safe to stare at the sun. And light reflected off water or mirrors can also damage your eyes. Use eclipse glasses. Or photograph it or film it. Or use indirect projection. 

There are also filters you can put on telescopes - but you need to get the right ones, put them at the objective end, not the eyepiece end, and discard them if there is a single hole develops in them.

See the Sky and Telescope tips for observing the sun.

WHY IS THERE NO HARD PROOF THAT NIBIRU IS NOT REAL?

Well it's the other way around. There is no hard proof that Nibiru exists. You can't disprove something that is not described in detail and with a story that keeps changing. There is nothing there that astronomers can get their teeth into to examine to see if there is something real.

If they had decent observations - could say where to look in the sky - say where it is relative to the Sun and how far from it -  and multiple confirmation - or it stayed in the same place in the sky for more than a few minutes - a planet stays in the same place in the sky for weeks on end unless it was so close it is between the Moon and the Earth. If it was a planet then it would be in the same place relative to the sun every time anyone looked at it.

But sometimes they see it, sometimes they don't, sometimes it is as large as the sun, seldom is smaller in angular diameter than Jupiter. One person in one place say they've observed it in one place, someone else says they saw it in another place, someone else says they saw six giant planets in a hexagonal pattern around the sun. There's no consistency at all.

WHAT ARE ASTRONOMERS DOING ABOUT IT THESE NIBIRU OBSERVATIONS?

Astronomers are keeping an eye on the sky, taking many photographs of the entire sky to high resolution every night. Amateur astronomers do follow up observations to track all the objects found. They know the position of every asteroid of 10 kilometers or larger that has any chance of getting close to Earth within the next couple of decades or so.

They don't need to do special searches for Nibiru, because there is just no way at all that they could miss a planet larger than Earth, thousands of kilometers in diameter. 

We'd see something like that way out far beyond Pluto in an amateur astronomer's ten inch telescope. World wide. Never mind a second solar system with a planet orbiting another star.

If anyone had an observation of such a thing as a possible new planet in our solar system - that pasts muster as a report to the International Astronomy Union, then amateur astronomers world wide would be tracking it and reporting where it is every clear night.

And as it got closer, by now it would be a bright star that everyone has been gradually following through the night sky, as it approaches the sun. It would be like the news stories about comets but much more so. 

It would be a very spectacular astronomical phenomenon that nobody could possibly miss and everybody would know about it and all the amateur astronomers world wide would be tracking it and talking about it. 

Indeed, with any plausible orbit for something like that, they wold have been tracking it since well before I was born, indeed well before anyone now alive was born. Most likely since the invention of the telescope at least.

HOW WOULD YOU REPORT A NEW PLANET OR SECOND SUN IN OUR SOLAR SYSTEM?

There aren't any instructions for reporting a new major planet or second sun in our solar system.

But suppose you wanted to report existence of a suspected new warf planet or asteroid in our solar system - this happens quite often in astronomy nowadays - there is a well established procedure.

What you have to do is to go to the International Astronomy Union website and look at their page"How to report a discovery".

For planets they say 

1. HAVE YOU FOUND SOMETHING AND IS IT NEW?

Please check the following to verify that you have made a discovery:

• Is it an image artifact? Can you confirm that what you have seen is real and not an instrumental artifact? "Ghost images" caused by nearby bright objects can be deceptive. Have you confirmed your observation on a second night and obtained multiple CCD or photographic exposures?
• What type of object is it?
• Motion: How much does the object move?
• Definitely detectable movement — it could be a comet or minor planet.
• other possibilities

There the Nibiru "observations" all fail at this stage, before you go any further. They haven't confirmed that what they see is real and not an image artefact - simple things like changing the direction you point your camera, using someone else's camera, taking many photos etc.
This is a very simple test you can do to spot the "lens flare Nibirus" (warning, strong language if you are sensitive to colourful use of swear words).

They also haven't confirmed their observation on a second day - since it's close to the sun then obviously daytime rather than at night, but is the same. They don't even confirm that it is in the same place relative to the sun earlier in the day or later in the day. And the ones that show Nibiru as moving around in the sky visibly during the video would be dismissed immediately as something local that couldn't possibly be a planet - a planet that did that would be moving faster than the speed of light.

Now you are directed to 

3. WHERE TO REPORT YOUR OBJECT

• ...
• Minor planets/asteroids:
• The Minor Planet Centre

The details for minor planets are here 

It's quite technical. But basically what you need is the exact time you did the observation and your best possible estimate of where it is in the sky.

They don't cover reporting a new planet or star close to our sun, as it's not possible that that could happen. 

But if you did spot a new planet or sun close to our sun, well I'm sure you would just need to have your photographs of it, which you could take all through the day as long as the sun is visible in the sky. A few photos taken every half hour during the day, say. A genuine planet wouldn't move noticeably in that time.

But a planet bright enough to be visible in the daytime would have thousands of reports from amateurs all around the world and would be headline news, and you'd get instructions on the news about how to observe it safely etc etc. 

It's not possible that that could happen without centuries of observation as it approached the Earth. But there have been bright daytime comets in the past. Including a comet in 1965 that was so bright you could see it in daylight just by blocking out the sun with your hands.

Comet Ikeya–Seki which was easily visible in the daytime sky close to the sun in 1965. I can't find photos of it close to the sun right now so this is a photo of it in the night sky. Back then many observations were done by drawing the objects, and cameras were much less commonly used in astronomy than they are today. But here is a painting of what it looked like in daylight. See also List of the nine most brilliant great comets. 

It's also possible to see the brightest planets in the daytime sky in the same way - by blocking out the sun. On a clear day, with a clear blue sky, if the conditions are very good, and when Venus is at its brightest and furthest from the sun, you can see Venus in this way with your naked eye.- this is an easy observation - here are instructions for last June when the Moon was close to Venus making it easier to spot. Be sure not to stare at the sun itself with your unaided eye. You can also see Jupiter in the daytime sky, but that's much more of a challenge. Even Mars is possible in optimal conditions. See ten surprising things you can see in the daytime sky.  (I've only seen Venus myself).

Actually Venus is probably visible to naked eye right now in daylight, throughout the day, on a clear day - as it is very bright in the early morning sky before dawn. The only problem is it is far from the sun, and you'd need to know where to look as it is not that brighter than the sky itself, but white in colour. Can't mistake it when you see it but you have to look in just the right place, helps if you have an astronomer friend to tell you where to look.

If this Nibiru was real, whatever it was - then it would be easily visible all day, close to the sun, not just at sunrise and sunset. With no gravitational effect disturbing the planets, the assumption would be that it is probably a very bright comet without a tail. And then you'd have a lot of research into how it managed to be circular and not have a tail. Comets can look circular when they first appear but not usually when close to the sun.

So, it's not impossible at all to find new bright objects that pass close to the sun, even ones that are bright enough to be visible in the daytime sky.

That's not why the observations are treated with skepticism. If there were any decent observations at all, any hint of something that seems like it could possibly be a new bright celestial object in the sky - well - amateur and professional astronomers world wide would be all over it, trying to find out more. Their first guess wouldn't be "planet" however, it would be "comet".

WAS NIBIRU "OBSERVED" IN PREVIOUS YEARS?

If you search for Nibiru videos and photos online it may seem that all the videos and photos were taken this year. Seems like nobody saw it until this year.

But that's just because of the way search results work. Usually when you search for something you will be interested in the latest news about it, at least for topics like this. Google learns from the way people search, and the algorithms will serve up the results that people are most interested in. Which for Nibiru means the most recent results.

So all the videos and photos for earlier years sink way down the search results. But they are easy to find if you do a search filttered by year.

 Here are the search listings for the youtube "sightings" of Nibiru up to  2013. Searching for Nibiru + sun. And here is the search listing prior to 2010 with some videos from 2008 and 2009. That seems to be when this idea of videoing the sun to look for Nibiru first began. On youtube anyway - same search for 2007 or earlier turns up nothing. But the first fake photos of Nibiru next to the sun go back as far as 2003

Early fake alleged photo of Nibiru from 2003. Apparently someone admitted to faking it to expose the Nibiru hoaxers. 

There are few videos early on, the earliest I found so far was in 2008. But that's probably because video cameras have goto much better. Back in 2003, very few people would be able to do a video of the sun, although nowadays it is so commonplace you might be surprised to realise that it was so hard as recently as just twelve years ago. Your mobile phone wouldn't have had capability for video and camearas also, you'd have had to get a proper video camera. And even today, not so many people have dedicated video cameras and even fewer carry them around with them wherever they go. But most now have a mobile phone or a camera capable of taking video and can just whip it out and video anything wherever they are.

WHY WOULD ANYONE WANT TO SCARE PEOPLE LIKE THIS IF IT IS NOT REAL? WOULD EVERYONE PLEASE STOP SCARING US

I don't think this is going to stop unfortunately. Based on past history, perhaps it's a reasonable guess that people will probably forget Nibiru for a few years. Scares in 2003, 2008, 2012, 2015 now - seems that it's every three to five years. Takes about three years to forget it enough so that a new scare can come along.

But it's about the fifth or sixth "Armageddon" so far this year. And more general Armageddon scares have been doing the rounds, every few years, for over 2000 years. So they don't seem likely to stop.

These things once started tend to come around and around. 

As an example, every year since 2002 the same hoax has gone around the internet saying that Mars will appear in the sky as large as the Moon on August 27th. It is based on a misunderstanding of a sentence in an astronomical email message. Which actually said that Mars, magnified 75 times would look as large as the Moon looks to the naked eye. It doesn't' seem likely that this will stop. See the Mars Hoax.

I think it is a case that if enough people repeat something enough times, they come to believe it, share it, and get others to believe it. And hardly anyone checks up to see if these hoaxes are true or not.

And the thing is that few people except the enthusiasts know much about astronomy or have had any education in it. Even if you did physics at school, you might not have covered astronomy in great depth And many things in astronomy go against the intuitions we have from life on a terrestrial planet. See for instance my Why A Ball Thrown To Earth From Orbit "Boomerangs". Can Astronauts Hit Earth With A Ball, Arrow Or Bullet? 

Similarly, I could easily be hoaxed in a fake story about football :).

BUT WHAT IF IT IS REAL ANYWAY?

If it was real, then Earth wouldn't be orbiting the Sun in a steady orbit as it is. It would have been flung away from the solar system, hit Jupiter or the sun, hit Venus or Mars, billions of years ago - since they say it's been doing these quick pass bys of the inner solar system every few hundred years.

Simulations show that our planets are packed together about as closely as they can be in a stable solar system. Add another planet as large as Earth doing flybys of the inner solar system close to Earth, and something would have to give. 

Also many of our spacecraft that we send to Mars or to Pluto or whatever wouldn't end up in the places we expect them to go because they would be deflected away by its gravity.

If it's a second sun, sunlight would be twice as bright as it usually is and we'd all be suffering from heat waves.

Also if it was real, and you think that these photos and videos are observations of "Nibiru" then it means that planets can suddenly jump around in our solar system at speeds faster than the speed of light, so if Nibiru can do that, Earth can too.

So when you wake up the next day you'd never know whether you'd find yourself orbiting here, or way out beyond Pluto in the Oort cloud, or careening past the sun or whatever.

You'd get lots of absurd consequences if it was real.

WOULD WE BE ABLE TO FEEL ITS GRAVITY?

A planet the other side of the sun would have no measurable gravity effects - we don't get tides from Venus. A second sun would, as the sun creates the difference between the neap and spring tides - the spring tides would be more extreme.

We wouldn't feel the effects here of a planet the other side of the sun, but it would push and pull our spacecraft out of their carefully planned trajectories when they go to other planets in a way that would be very noticeable - they just wouldn't get to where they wanted them to go.

And even more so - we monitor the movements of thousands of tiny asteroids in the asteroid belt.

If a big object was to pass through the asteroid belt or anywhere near it, we'd spot it immediately even if it was totally invisible, through the movements of the asteroids that would get pulled off course as it passed close to thenm.

Not only do we know where all the planets are in the solar system, of size of Earth and much smaller, out to way beyond Pluto. We can even track all the objects of diameter 10 kilometers or more all the way out to Jupiter. If we can map out every asteroid down to sizes smaller than New York, do you think we can miss a planet the size of the Earth?

WHAT IF IT IS HIDDEN BEHIND THE SUN?

Yes it is possible for a planet or a star to hide behind the sun briefly. 

But unless its year is exactly the same as Earth's year, then at some point it will no longer be behind the sun. For instance if its year is 300 days, then by a year later it is 65 days behind it's original position behind the sun. And it would keep moving to different positions. Like Venus.

By Kepler's laws then the length of the year depends only on the longest diameter of its elliptical orbit. So to have the same year as Earth, it's orbit has to have the same longest diameter.

It is easy to show that a star or a planet with an orbit like that, opposite the sun from Earth, is in an unstable orbit. 

Anyway - they manage to send spacecraft to land on Mars, to flyby Venus and Mercury, orbit Mars, visit comets etc - and to do that they need to know the positions of every planet in the inner solar system and take account of their gravitational effects.

Especially when plotting orbits of asteroids, then they have to take account of even very minute effects. A tiny inaccuracy in the estimate of the mass of Earth, Venus, or Mars would throw their predictions of a future flyby of an asteroid way off course. 

They'd spot the gravitational effects of an extra planet or sun immediately, all the spacecraft that go anywhere near it would end up in different places from where you expected them to go. And the asteroids they are tracking would go way off course after a few orbits of the sun.

And - it's possible to be hidden behind the sun from the point of view of Earth. But we have spacecraft all over the solar system, that occasionally take photographs of the sun. They never see any unknown planets or stars in the photos.

Here for instance is a photograph of the night sky with sun just below the horizon, from the surface of Mars. You  can see Earth, Mars' moon Deimos, and Mercury. These photographs never show Nibiru.

It's just not at all possible that a planet has been hiding the other side of the sun for thousands of years, and then suddenly comes around to our side and comes towards the Earth. Planets follow Kepler's laws and they simply can't run around the solar system like a demented gazelle :). Or hide behind the sun and then suddenly jump out at us like a leopard. That's just fantasy. As Neil De Grasse Tyson said, it's a fun work of fiction. It might do quite well as a children's story - or a movie plot scenario also as some of those are silly also. 

That's because a planet can't stay behind the sun. That's the way orbits work. We keep orbiting the sun so as you go through the year we see the sun from all directions. It's a bit like a squirrel hiding behind a tree. If you keep circling the tree, the only way the squirrel can keep hidden is to circle around it also at the same speed you do.

That's all very well for squirrels, it can monitor what I'm doing and move in response to me to stay hidden.

But a planet has no independent power of movement, it just moves in response to gravity. It can't monitor what the Earth is doing and stay hidden.

The only way it could hide behind the sun for any length of time is if its "year" is exactly the same as ours. But it is easy to show that that is an unstable solution so that can't happen for a planet in a stable orbit.

So to get behind the sun, first it has to be somewhere else first. You can go back through the Soho images and check that no big star or planet has ever passed behind the sun. Lots of comets have. But they always follow steady orbits and come out again.

You can also try following the comets and watch how they pass behind the sun. Sometimes they re-appear and sometimes they evaporate in the heat of the sun. Often they get brighter as they pass behind the sun. But nothing just goes behind the sun, stays there for a few years, and then pops back into view again. That's not possible according to Kepler's laws.

I suppose they think it is so close to the sun you can't see it because the sun is so bright. But though it is perfectly true you should not stare at the sun - there are many safe and easy ways to look at the sun. Including using special eclipse glasses. Or projection. Or special solar telescopes. Every day thousands of amateur astronomers look at the sun safely. You can't spot really faint asteroids like a few tens of meters across, even a one kilometer diameter asteroid could get hidden in the glare of the sun until about three weeks before it gets here. But a planet as big as Earth - no chance at all of that happening.

WHAT IF IT IS REALLY CLOSE TO THE SUN AND HAS BEEN THERE FOR MANY YEARS AND THEN COMES OUT FROM BEHIND THE SUN?

That's just not possible for the other reasons, it's just not at all possible that a planet has been hiding the other side of the sun for thousands of years, and then suddenly comes around to our side and comes towards the Earth. Planets follow Kepler's laws and they simply can't run around the solar system like a demented gazelle :). Or hide behind the sun and then suddenly jump out at us like a leopard. That's just fantasy. As Neil De Grasse Tyson said, it's a fun work of fiction. It might do quite well as a children's story - or a movie plot scenario also as some of those are silly also. 

In more detail, even the closest planet to the sun, Mercury, is easily visible to the naked eye when it is furthest from the sun, at dawn and dusk and when you know where to look. So it would have to be closer than Mercury. Anything that close to the sun, if it is whipping around in a a single swing through from the outer solar system, can't stay close to the sun for more than a few weeks or months at most. Mercury's "year" is 88 days. And a planet that orbits closer to the sun multiple times can't suddenly change its orbit and come towards Earth.

HOW CAN WE BE SURE THAT IT ISN'T THERE

This is because of our observations of other planets. We know how planets orbit the sun very well.

If it was a planet, it would be a bright light in the sky like Venus. But we've been tracing the paths of those bright lights for thousands of years, and they follow predictable patterns. Modern astronomy goes back to Kepler who formulated his three laws.

This is back in the eighteenth century. He compiled many observations of the planets by his mentor Tycho Brahe, a great observational astronomer. He deduced his three laws.

Kepler's laws diagram from wikipedia.

His first law is that the orbits are all ellipses. Ellipses are constructed using two centers or foci, unlike circles that have just one center. He showed that they follow elliptical orbits with the sun at one of the foci of each ellipse.

His second law is that the planets trace out equal areas in equal times. So when the planet is closer to the sun, it moves around the sun more quickly.

His third law is that the length of the planet's "year" depends on the longest diameter of the ellipse according to a simple mathematical formula (it's "year" squared is proportional to half of its longest diameter cubed).

See Kepler's laws.

These laws were observational at first. But Newton then showed how you can derive them all from a much simpler basic law - the inverse square law of attraction - that the gravitational force of one object on another gets weaker according to the square of the distance. So if the distance between two objects is doubled, the attraction they feel due to gravity is divided by four. If the distance is multiplied by three, the attraction is divided by nine, and so on.

That is pretty much how it is still understood today. Einstein added a refinement which makes a difference to planets very close to the sun like Mercury, but even then, it is only a minor adjustment to the orbit.

So, the main reason astronomers are totally skeptical of Nibiru is that it would have to follow an orbit that doesn't follow Kepler's laws. That's rather like saying it can levitate. That gravity has no effect on it.

And add to that, that the observations make no sense. They seem to think that it is active at sunrise, tends to rush away from the sun at sunrise - but sunrise is at different times at different places. If it is a real object out in the solar system, rather than a mirage or lens flare - how can it rush away from the sun, say in Japan, but remain hidden behind the sun in the US, then a bit later, rush away from the sun, in the US and be hidden behind it from Japan? The size of the Earth is tiny compared to the size of the solar system - all other planets look in the same place in the sky no matter where you observe them from Earth.

While on the other hand lens flares, and mirages (which happen at sunrise), fit their observations fine. It's also easily possible that some of the more dramatic videos you find in youtube were manipulated in image manipulation tools to get lots of views.

WHAT ABOUT A BLACK HOLE OR A BROWN DWARF - DO THEY ALL FOLLOW KEPLER'S LAWS - HOW CAN WE BE SO SURE?

Good question. When kepler formulated his laws originally, he had no explanation of why the planets moved in ellipses with the sun at the focus, traced out equal areas in equal times, or why the length of the planet's year depended only on the longest diameter of the ellipse in the precise relationship he discovered. They were just emprical laws.

The big breakthrough came rather later with Newton, who in his Principia - first he developed the basics of calculus for the first time ever (simultaneously with Leibnitz in France with a somewhat different approach). 

Then using this new mathematical tool he is able to derive Kepler's laws from the hypothesis of the inverse square law of universal gravitation.

This is the law that as you double the distance between two objects, then the gravitational attraction between them drops to a quarter - and if you have three times the distance, the gravitational attraction drops to a ninth and so on.

All our experiments to date have confirmed this law which is indeed universal. Einstein showed that it has to be refined subtly if you orbit close to a very heavy object - leading to a small adjustment in the calculation of the length of Mercury's orbit. But this is a very minor effect in our solar system.

So it's because they are underpinned by the inverse square law of gravity- that we think there are no exceptions to Kepler's laws. As an approximation that is.

They are approximate - it's the orbit a planet would have if there was only the planet, and the sun, and nothing else in the universe. But the sun is so large that it is the dominant effect for any planet or asteroid.

The other planets also tug on it, and these can cause the orbits to change shape - get more elliptical or less elliptical. They can also sometimes change the length of the year. But all this is well understood.

And to confirm this, then using this inverse square law of gravity theory - refined by Einsteins extra corrections if necessary - we can navigate spacecraft precisely anywhere in the solar system. If there were any errors in our understanding of this law, our spacecraft would keep getting lost or crashing.

The laws apply to anything that is mainly influenced by gravity. They don't apply to lightweight things like electrons with charge that are influenced by the magnetic fields of planets and stars. There are other exceptions also but those are all well understood also. Some people think our understanding of gravity is incomplete - but they are talking about effects noticeable, for instance, when you measure the orbits of stars orbiting a galaxy. 

Everyone agrees that it is very accurate for the solar system.

Black holes are massive objects, so their orbits are the same as for planets.

We have only been had this theory for a few hundred years, true. But can then use it retrospectively to explain earlier observations. And use it to study the evolution of our solar system - and of other stars. If our planets weren't following the inverse square law in the past, to a high degree of precision, they couldn't have the same orbits so we wouldn't be here.

Also we can observe other stars and other galaxies, and the galaxies also move under attraction to each other. In these observations we are looking back billions of years. 

There is indeed an idea that laws of physics like this can change. But if so, it is talking about a gradual subtle effect. To first approximation at least, it can't have changed or the universe won't look the same as it does. It might be possible for this or other laws of physics to vary by tiny amounts over long periods of time. Some scientists think this is an interesting enough possibility to study furhter. And there's an idea that in the very early universe, there was no distinction between many of the forces. And they broke apart through "symmetry breaking". In unified field theories, then even gravity could have been different in the past. But if so, that was all over many billions of years ago and it hasn't changed since, or only minutely for those who think that minute changes are still possible.

WHAT ABOUT REVELATIONS - DOESN'T THAT MEAN THE WORLD HAS TO END SOON?

This has happened over and over E.g. back in 2012, world predicted to end on 21st May, big crowd gathered in Times Square. One person there had spent $140,000 on telling people about it - his life savings. And of course nothing happened. The prophet who predicted that immediately said it's going to happen in October instead. Of course nothing happened, we are still here.

This has been going on for at least 2000 years since Revelations was written and some people interpreted it this way. Of course I can't say you or I will still be alive then. Might be hit by a bus or a car, who can say. Do drive safely and avoid drinking excessive alcohol while driving, and not do things like talk on your mobile phone while driving. Healthy levels of exercise. That will do a lot more to help prevent you dying by December than watching conspiracy videos about what Brian Cox calls this "bullshit planet".

I've never known anyone to predict anything astronomical using scriptures. While astronomers frequently predict all sorts of things using Newton's laws, Kepler's laws etc. I don't think this is a strong point of the scriptures. They don't seem to be especially good at predicting astronomical events. They do seem to have value in helping people to find a direction in their life, and hope and happiness. If they are making you scared, then something is going wrong. The original author of Revelations probably wrote the book in order to cheer up Christians who were facing persecution in the early days of Christianity. 

It might perhaps be reassuring to look at.  this list of predictions of the end of the world. Also this list of 242 predictions of the end of the world.

People have been predicting Armageddon every century since the first century, and recently, several times every year. It must be one of the least successful predictions ever. 

Bear in mind, many religions don't have any notion of Armageddon at all. For instance, for many traditions of Buddhists, Shakyamuni Buddha is traditionally thought of as the fourth of a thousand Buddhas in many cultures, so his teachings have to fade away, then another Buddha arise after a gap, and that has to happen another 996 times before the Earth can be destroyed, in this mythology. In this way of thinking, the world eventually gets destroyed or falls apart, just because nothing is permanent, not because there is any wrathful deity who will destroy it.

And amongst Christians, then many of them interpret the teachings in the book of Revelations in a variety of ways.

Summarized in  "From Adam to Armageddon: A Survey of the Bible", page 178 as

"1. A view that Revelation must be understood in the context of its own time and the events symbolized in its pages as having already taken place.

"2. A view that only a portion of the revelations have occurred and that the work offers clues to the remaining portion of human history.

"3. A view that the book is best understood spiritually, and no attempt should be made to interpret it in the context of history.

"4. A view that the book is prophetic and its prophecies are yet to be completely fulfilled."

The idea of a literal Armageddon is the fourth of those common ways of interpreting the Bible. 

Revelations was added to the Bible at quite a late date. It was originally regarded as heretical by some of the early Christians.

It originates as a message of hope to first century Christians who were being persecuted and many of them dying for their faith. As the author of "From Adam to Armageddon" says

"Regardless of whether Revelation holds the secret of the time and place that history as we know it will end, it holds the view that how one lives matters greatly. That alone makes  it of value for those who use it as an authority for their lives. Its vision may have been intended primarily to support Christians facing death for their first century faith, but it has served a much broader purpose for continuing Christianity. A book of comfort and devotion, it has called people to faithfulness over the years, while assuring them of the faithfulness of the God it proclaims."
(From Adam to Armageddon: A Survey of the Bible - page 180 )

That's why the view 1, that the events described in Revelations have already taken place is also a reasonable view to take, or the view 3, that it is best understood spiritually, in both cases it has no future predictive power since it either describes events of the first century AD, or it is meant to be taken spiritually, as a message of hope with no intention of prophecy of actual events in the world. And many Christians do take it in those ways.

I'm sure whoever wrote it did not write it in order to scare people living twenty one centuries later. And why on Earth would someone writing in the first century AD want to encode hidden messages for the twenty first century into their work?

For more about this see my answer to Why did God create the world if he was just going to destroy it in Armageddon?

According to scientific understanding the Earth will probably eventually become uninhabitable, but not for an almost unimaginably long timescale, long enough for humans to evolve a second time from the tiniest multi-cellular lifeforms. See my End Of All Life On Earth - A Billion Years From Now - Can It Be Avoided - And Who Will Be Here Then?

As Neil de Grasse Tyson said, these are people who surely must have flunked physics at school, who know nothing about astronomy or physics, who for some reason think they can use the scriptures to predict astronomical events. Nobody would employ them if they applied for a job searching for planets.

There are people who search for planets around other stars and distant planets around our star. And they are very successful at it too. Found numerous extra "dwarf planets" beyond Pluto and many planets around other stars. But they don't use scriptures to find these planets. As far as I know, nobody has ever found a planet using scriptures.

It would just be a harmless eccentricity like the flat Earth society. I have no quarrel with the flat Earth society if people want to believe that. But this belief is making many people scared, to no purpose at all as far as I can see. And it never stops.

This by the way is about the fifth prediction of an end of the world so far this year. Seems to come in clusters, every few years you get lots of predictions, until everyone gets totally fed up. Then they seem to forget about it for a year or two, then you get lots of predictions again. At least, I remember a big fuss in 2012, and previously in 2010. Now it's 2015. Maybe three years is long enough for people to forget about the last failed prediction enough for it to have impact again?

Remember none of this would mean anything if you were brought up in another religion, say Hindu, or Shinto, Jains, Ancestor worship, Confucian, Taoist or Buddhist. They don't have this same idea of Armageddon. And many Christians also don't take it literally, and think the events described either have already happened, or are not rooted in time at all. 

The main positive message from it is that how one leads one's life matters greatly. Which I think most can agree on in all religions or none. But you don't have to think in terms of the world being destroyed in two months time to get that message. 

And being scared can have the opposite effect of thinking that everything you do is futile. If anyone takes Revelations that way, it is surely not what the author had in mind.

SO DOES THAT MEAN THERE IS NOTHING THAT COULD KILL US IN DECEMBER OR MARCH (THE TWO MOST RECENT DATES FOR "NIBIRU")?

First of course neither I nor anyone else can say anything about car accidents, medical issues, hurricanes, twistors, volcanoes etc. If you are concerned about your own safety, probably the best thing you can do is to be more careful while driving, avoid drink and drive, avoid talking on your mobile phone while driving, and so on. And eat well, exercise at least a bit, and generally look after your health.

Doing things like that can actually help. While getting more and more anxious about cosmic disaster isn't going to help you in any way at all.

But having said that, of course this questions is about Nibiru.

So, certainly this Nibiru can't because it is nonsense. Also we can confidently say, that no other asteroid of any sizem can hit us by then, down to 10 kilometers in diameter at least. Because those are already all mapped out by the asateroid surveys right out to beyond the outer edge of the asteroid belt, and anything with a longer orbit than that would take much longer than two months to get here.

For smaller ones though, the survey is not yet complete. We know 90% of the nearby one kilometer diameter ones - which leaves 10% yet to find, most of which they expect to find by the 2020s.

A recent one kilometer diameter asteroid, the Halloween asteroid, was discovered only 21 days before its flyby of Earth. This one, you may remember it, came so close we got excellent radio sightings of it from the Aceribo telescope.

This is very rare, it was in an unusual orbit and came at us directly from the sun. But that shows that it is in principle possible for quite a large meteorite - one kilometer across - to hit us with only three weeks of warning. Though - far more likely to do a flyby as this one did, because the Earth is a tiny target compared to vastness of space.

So - nobody at present can give a guarantees about smaller meteorites. 

And can't say much about smaller meteorites. Especially the 100 meter diameter ones. These could arrive with a lot less than three weeks warning. And we don't have anything like a complete survey of them yet.

And something as small as that wouldn't yet be visible if it was coming from the direction of the sun, had never done a recent flyby of Earth since we started searching for them thoroughly, and was due to hit us in December, or any other time more than a few days away. Something like that could destroy a city and devastate much of a small country. 

Until we send very sensitive space telescopes into orbit we can still get surprises by tiny ones like that at any time.

Even those though, the 100 meter asteroids - although far more common than the larger ones, are so rare that there are no accounts of them hitting a populated area through all of recorded history.

And of course can't say about other things such as car accidents etc :). Or medical conditions or etc etc

But definitely - do stop worrying about hidden suns or planets or such like. It's just nonsense.. 

The only ones we need to worry about in the near future are the ones smaller than ten kilometers diameter (until the searches are complete) and on longer timescales there could be larger ones including ten kilometers if the come from beyond Jupiter, but those are rare and you would expect a couple of decades warning for those ones. 

•  We don't expect planet sized ones at all. 
   
• Ones of size a few hundred kilometers get caught by Jupiter, torn to pieces, or deflected to hit the sun or Jupiter itself. The cratering record of Mars, Moon Mercury, and what there is of craters on Venus show that this has been happening for over three billion years, Jupiter has never dropped its guard for three billion years, since the £late heavy bombardment" in the early solar system which formed the biggest craters on the Moon. 
   
  No really big impacts like this anywhere in the inner solar system for the last 3 billion years. Warning times likely to be of order of centuries for these. And if it got broken up by Jupiter (rather than deflected to hit the sun or Jupiter), there'd be an increased hazard of the 10 km meteorites for perhaps 20,000 years or so. Anyway - extraordinarily unlikely, and it is something that would play out over a very long timescale. By then, likely to be centuries into our future, we can probably do something about it also.
   
• Ones of size around ten kilometers or a bit more - they can hit Earth but we have mapped them all so would have loads of warning, like a couple of decades. These are extremely unlikely, and you can be 99.99999% certain that it won't happen in the next century.
   
• Smaller ones of around 100 meters or so are seriously bad news for a city or a small country and could hit us with only weeks or days of warning depending how small they are. But even these are so rare they haven't hit a populated areea in recorded history.
   
• Really tiny ones like the Russian meteorite, which could harm some people, have a reasonable probability of happening again this century.
   
  The spaceguard meteorite search is now turning its attention to these smaller ones since the larger ones down to 1 km in vicinity of Earth are all mapped out or will be by the 2020s. If you want to use your anxiety constructively, you could raise awareness of these smaller asteroids and the possibility of mapping them all out if we had sufficient funding. Half a billion dollars could fund the B612 space telescope for instance and get most of them mapped out in six years.

METEOR SHOWERS

Though you can't hope to see Nibiru in the sky, as it isn't real, you can certainly see shooting stars, they are very common. If you are lucky you might see a big bright fireball. At their brightest they can be brighter than the Moon.

Here is a list of the best meteor showers of the year. Some have very narrow windows to see them - the Leonids are best seen after midnight and you need to look for them on the 17th and 18th November, may be a few before or after. That's because they are the debris stream from comets or asteroids and if the stream of debris is narrow, then it may be that the Earth only spends a day or two passing through it each year. Others are much broader and we pass through them for many days or a month in the case of the Orionids. And they all come from different directions in the sky - from Orion for the Orionids and from Leo for the Leonids etc - not that you need to look at Orion to see the Orionids - actually better to look a bit away from it as the shortest trails are the ones you get if you look directly at the radiant and the longer trails are further away. When the radiant is a long way below the horizon you are much less likely to see them So the best time to see each shower depends on when its radiant constellation rises and sets.

AM I PAID TO WRITE THIS TO COVER UP NIBIRU?

With my earlier article, then some of the commentators asked me if I am paid to write this article to help cover things up.

So, I am not paid to write my science blog here. Some of the science bloggers get a small income from showing ads on their posts, I don't think it is much, but you will notice that my posts here don't have any - except a few at the bottom. That's because I asked to opt out to remove the ads. I would opt out of the ones at the bottom as well if I could, but it's not an option. You don't see them if you are signed into an account here.

I'm just a mathematician in the UK, living on one of the Scottish islands, with a long term interest in astronomy, grew up in the 1960s during the Apollo landings. If you look at my other blog posts, many are about space exploration, planetary protection and the search for extra terrestrial life in our solar system (if present) and beyond.

It may be reassuring to hear a bit more about me and who I am. As my "day job" I'm a programmer who writes music software. My most popular program is Bounce Metronome.

Check out the Astonishing Bounce Metronome Pro.

I've written a few blog posts about my software here too, see

• Pure Tones For Healing - Harmonious Lissajous Knots - Pendulum Waves - Sloth Canon Music From Numbers
• Music And Mathematics Of Fractal-Like Sloth Canon Number Sequences
• Rhythms In Maths - Most Out Of Time Perfect Drummers Can Be - Penrose Tiling Rhythm - Cantor's Set Rhythm,...
• Metronomes - Do You Need Them? And A Metronome Using Conducting Techniques For Visual Precision
• and also related to my "day job" though not directly about my software: How Easy Would It Be to Communicate with Musical ETs - as in "Close Encounters Of A Third Kind"?

I've also tried my hand at inventing board games and at maths research, but ended up spending most of my time programming.

Hopefully that's enough, so you get an idea of who I am :).

ASSESS IT FOR YOURSELF

But to assess this for yourself, you can try learning some astronomy. Meet up with some amateur astronomers - they will soon put you right Just ordinary folk like yourself who happen to have a strong interest and passion for astronomy as a hobby. Once you have a better understanding of what a planet is, and orbits and other basic ideas in astronomy, you'll see for yourself that it is all nonsense.

Not much by way of astronomical education is needed in this case. The only reason this one spreads so much is that few people have much astronomical background at all. So are easily fooled by things that wouldn't fool you for a moment if you knew just a little bit more.

That way you won't need to ask people like me. You will just be able to see for yourself that this is all nonsense.

HAVE YOU WRITTEN ANYTHING ELSE ON NIBIRU?

No, only the earlier version of this article. But I have done a few on asteroid impacts, also on apocalypse scenarios.

• Is It True That An Asteroid Will Strike Earth On [Insert Date Here]? - Truth Behind Asteroid Scare Stories
• September 24th, 2015 - Just Another Day In Space - Asteroid Flybys, "Blood Moons" And Armageddon Demystified
• Giant Asteroid Headed Your Way? - How We Can Detect And Deflect Them

And lots of answers on Quora. Here are some which they've categorized as answers for Apocalyptic and Post Apocalyptic Hypothetical Scenarios.

KEEPING UP TO DATE WITH ASTRONOMY NEWS

First you have to watch out for the unreliable sites and joke stories.

JOKE STORIES ABOUT NIBIRU

Here is one from this very website, Right Under Our Eyes: Nibiru On Its Way?

It's so obviously a joke that I can't imagine many were fooled by it and took it literally - perhaps some would be fooled momentarily, but not after reading to the end of it :).

The Daily Telegraph one I quoted at the head of this article I am pretty sure was also meant as a joke, at least quite a bit "tongue in cheek" The end of the world now predicted for December say doomsday groups. But that would be harder to detect for anyone who is genuinely scared about cosmic apocalypse scenarios.

Some entire websites are satirical, just meant as a joke. The Onion is a famous one of those. You are not expected to believe a word of anything posted there. At first sight it may seem like a genuine news site, but as you read it, you find more and more over the top remarks and then it graadually dawns on you that the whole thing is just a huge joke. I can't find any stories about nibiru on the onion - maybe because they don't want to panic people - but it gives an idea of what this "joke news" genre is like and some of the motivation for these jokey stories that aren't meant to be taken seriously at all. It's mainly pure enjoyment, at the silliness of the stories, plus sometimes making telling points along the way.

UNRELIABLE PROFESSIONAL LOOKING WEBSITES

Other big "news" websites are not meant as a joke, but are well known for publishing a lot of unreliable news. There are many of these.

"Before it's news" is particularly famous as one of the sites that often publishes stories that are not very well researched or credible. Anyone can post articles there, with no peer review, no journalistic overview, or editor, and it is a noted hot spot on the internet for crackpot theories. See Before it's News (rational wiki).

NIBIRU DEBUNKING ARTICLES AND VIDEOS

Many of those who asked me about this said things such as "how come it is only you saying this". Why only you out of billions of people writing like this?

So it's clear that many of you are not aware of the many Nibiru debunking articles and videos. I don't think they get linked to much from the conspiracy websites.

Also, perhaps because they are less scary, and not linked to much by the more popular scare sites, they tend to drop way down in the youtube and google search results and may be hard to find.

Here are a few.

DEBUNKING FROM NASA

That's  David Morrison, senior scientist at the NASA Astrobiology Institute at NASA Ames Research Center in California, a distinguished astrophysicist best known for his work on risk assessment of asteroids and comets. Retired now, in the past he has been director of the Search for Extra Terrestrial Inteligences (SETI Institute) and director of space at NASA Ames, and also did an "Ask the astrobiologist" column for NASA for some years.

Here are some of his answers to questions from the public about Nibiru

• If Nibiru is a hoax like you state consistently, then why did NASA admit to it on their own web page? Second off, Why did NASA build a Telescope on the southern pole of the earth to where supposively Nibiru will be heading from, if it actually exist.

• I have combed through the evidence you have posted about Nibiru and there is still one thing you scientist have heavily avoided! What about the Sumerian Tablets and what they say about Nibiru, the Anunnaki, and our own history? When I read the translation of the tablets the earliest stories are the most believable. They talk of visiting planet after planet as they traveled until they reached earth, and they refer to refueling on Mars. How do you explain the Annunaki and the Sumerian tablets translations?

• Question about Nibiru: I have made a lot of photos from digital web camera in Japan via Internet. What is the object near the sun as large as moon? Millions people around the world have seen this object. And the number of such people grows very quickly. It's often situated near the sun, and The NASA keeps dead silence in this case.

• etc etc. In total he has answered 193 questions from the general public about Nibiru.

For a short overview of this from NASA: Why the world didn't end in 2012.

On Nibiru they just say

"Q: What is the origin of the prediction that the world will end in 2012?

"A: The story started with claims that Nibiru, a supposed planet discovered by the Sumerians, is headed toward Earth. This catastrophe was initially predicted for May 2003, but when nothing happened the doomsday date was moved forward to December 2012 and linked to the end of one of the cycles in the ancient Mayan calendar at the winter solstice in 2012 - hence the predicted doomsday date of December 21, 2012.
...

"Q: Is there a planet or brown dwarf called Nibiru or Planet X or Eris that is approaching the Earth and threatening our planet with widespread destruction?

"A: Nibiru and other stories about wayward planets are an Internet hoax. There is no factual basis for these claims. If Nibiru or Planet X were real and headed for an encounter with the Earth in 2012, astronomers would have been tracking it for at least the past decade, and it would be visible by now to the naked eye. Obviously, it does not exist. Eris is real, but it is a dwarf planet similar to Pluto that will remain in the outer solar system; the closest it can come to Earth is about 4 billion miles.

See Why the world didn't end in 2012.

COSMOPHOBIA

David Morrison has also made a website cosmophobia.org - Cosmophobia is a new word he has coined, meaning "an irrational fear of the cosmos" due to the enormous number of emails he got at his job from people who were genuinely totally scared by these various doomsday scenarios - to the extent of some being suicidal etc.

Here is his video talk about cosmophobia.

Here is his page about Nibiru which goes into a lot of detail about it, debunking it.

DEBUNKING - EVERYONE ELSE

Some go into a lot of detail like The Planet X Saga: The Scientific Arguments in a Nutshell, others just say in a few words that it is totally silly. So here are some examples that I've gathered.

• Planet Nibiru is not real. by Earth and Sky chief editor  Bruce McClure 
• Phil Plait's debunking article: The Planet X Saga: The Scientific Arguments in a Nutshell. This goes into a lot of detail Phil Plait  worked on the Hubble space telescope and is author of many books on astronomy and writes an entertaining accurate science blog on astronomical topics called "Bad Astronomy".
•  Neil DeGrasse Tyson's video which I already gave above - he is a very popular TV astronomer in the US, also an astrophysicist and director of the planetarium in New York City.
• tweet by Brian Cox - he is a particle physicist associated with the Large Hadron Collider in Europe - and he is a very popular TV expert presenter on astronomy in the UK who has done many television programs and TV series on astronomy
• Colin Johnston's post for the Armagh planetarium in Ireland - he is its science education presenter.

The Nibiru videos and stories rarely link to these, and if they do it is to say that they are part of a world wide cover up conspiracy. Judge for yourself :).  I'm sure there are many more.

WHY DON'T WE GET MORE NEWS STORIES DEBUNKING IT IN THE TOP ASTRONOMY JOURNALS AND WEBSITES

In particular those asking the questions pointed out that there seemed to be nothing in them debunking Nibiru this time around.

That's because it isn't news for most people. You aren't going to get articles debunking this in Sky and Telescope or Astronomy Magazine or Astronomy Now because it wouldn't be regarded as astronomy. Typical readers of those magazines would already know enough to judge for themselves that these stories are nonsense and they don't need to be told and wouldn't be interested in buying articles like this.

Incidentally if you want to get a better understanding of astronomy - as well as talking to amateur astronomers, you can also try reading a few astronomy magazines. There are many wonderful things in the sky you can read about, and maybe you can get someone to show you them through a telescope also. Or visit a planetarium to find out about astronomy.

But you won't find anything there about newly discovered planets in the inner solar system or new suns. You will find lots of stories nowadays about discovery of planets around other stars.

Here for instance is a picture of Earth to the right and six of the most Earth like planets found orbiting other stars recently.

The six most Earth like Alien Planets discovered so far, as of August this year. For details see the Space.com article.

They are artist's impressions - we can't photograph the planets themselves, because they are so far away, only detect them by their gravitational influence on their parent star. 

If you include the non Earth like planets, then hundreds of them are known now. There's a great poster of all the exoplanets discovered to date here on Halcyon maps

WHERE TO GO FOR RELIABLE ASTRONOMY NEWS

To get an idea of what the Nibiru stories sound like to anyonoe with a basic background in astronomy, try replacing Nibiru by "giant pumpkin" - are you worried that the Earth will be hit by a giant pumpkin in December?

Have you ever heard of any successful prediction of anything in astronomy based on ancient scriptures? Have these people that write these Nibiru stories or present the Nibiru videos ever successfully predicted any astronomical event?

For a more reputable source of astronomy news, try astronomy magazines such as:

• Astronomy magazine
• Sky and Telescope
• Astronomy Now

Also try browsing the astronomy magazines section in any large stationer (or news agent or whatever you call it).

For online reliable sources on astronomy, try these websites:

• Universe Today
• Earth Sky
• Astrobiology Magazine (the NASA magazine on astrobiology). 

They are all reliable sources of information on astronomy. As well as many others, but if you monitor those three sites you'll be up to date on just about anything of significance in astronomy news.

Astronomy is a popular amateur hobby with many people world wide involved in it. It is also one of the few hobbies where the keenest amateurs are a vital part of modern science - there are many areas of research that simply couldn't be done without the support of the amateur astronomers, including asteroid tracking.

These magazines and news sites are how many of us keep in touch with the latest developments. If you are interested in the subject and want to take it up as a hobby yourself, you can also try joining your local amateur astronomy group. Unless you live in a remote location, there is probably one close by.