Planet of doom

Here I was, thinking that the stupidest thing I'd hear all day was that windmills cause cancer and that the way to stop hurricanes is to detonate a nuclear bomb in the middle of one, when along comes my friend A. J. Aalto, the amazingly talented author of the Marnie Baranuik series, and asks me if I've ever heard of Planet 7x.

Well, I'd heard of the actual seventh planet (better known as Uranus) and I'd heard of Planet X, but Planet 7x was a new one on me.  A friend, she said, had told her all about it, and when I say "all" I mean it, because apparently it came in the form of a five-hour monologue while A. J. was trapped in a car with him.   "Planet 7X... is the reason for all bad things on earth," A. J. explained to me.  "He tried to explain the 'science' proving it, which hurt my head, but I was in no position to show him where he was going wrong.  I googled it just now—wow, a goldmine of woo.   Pure woo."

So naturally I had to follow suit.  And after a couple of hours of research, I think I'd amend "wow" to "what the actual fuck?"  Because this is a synthesis of about two dozen different realms of craziness, including apocalyptic prophecy, conspiracy theories, biblical literalism, Atlantis, gravity denialism (no, I'm not making that up), and various wackiness about supervolcanoes, asteroid impacts, the shift of the magnetic poles, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the Mayans, the Black Death, Alexander the Great, invisibility cloaks, Ronald Reagan, and the Ice Age.

Oh, but he states outright that he doesn't believe in the Flat Earth.  That would be ridiculous.

Apparently this whole thing is the brainchild of one Gil Broussard, and this is where the whole thing gets an added frisson of weird coincidence, because Broussard hails from my home town of Lafayette, Louisiana.  Not only that, apparently Broussard got the idea for Planet 7x from two University of Louisiana physicists, Dr. John Matese and Dr. Daniel Whitmire.

So it's even weirder, because I majored in physics at the University of Louisiana, and I've taken classes with both of these guys.  I took Quantum Mechanics with Dr. Matese (whose name Broussard misspells "Matisse," which I guess is understandable enough), and Astronomy with Dr. Whitmire.  And what's even weirder is that I went "aha" when I saw their names -- because I knew why they'd inspired Broussard's kooky idea.

When I was an undergraduate, Matese and Whitmire were working on a (legitimate) theory that went by the unfortunate name of "Planet X," and in fact I heard them give a talk on it.  Their idea, which was persuasive enough to merit a paper in Nature in 1985, was that there is a large planet outside of the orbit of Pluto that periodically passes through dense parts of the Oort Cloud, thus gravitationally perturbing the orbits of comets and sending them hurtling inward toward the Sun.  This created regular spikes in cometary impacts on Earth, and were the source of mass extinctions.

Their theory hasn't stood the test of time especially well, and there's been no subsequent hard evidence that their Planet X even exists.  Furthermore, we have pretty good models for the causes of mass extinctions, largely triggered by supervolcano eruptions (e.g. the Deccan Traps and Siberian Traps) and collision by asteroids (not comets), such as the one that left the Chicxulub Crater in the Gulf of Mexico.

But what Gil Broussard has done is take Matese's and Whitmire's theory and twist it out of all recognition.  Planet 7x (I don't know where the "7" comes from; it probably says somewhere on the website, but honestly, I only got through about half of it before pooping out) is in a highly elliptical orbit, and when it comes in toward its perihelion, it does things like send "plasma discharges" toward the Earth (I have no clue why), which not only causes craters and mass extinctions, but makes the magnetic poles flip.  This is all documented in the Bible, apparently, and explains such events as: the parting of the Red Sea (why a huge planet swooping by affected only the water in one location, I have no idea); the account of the battle against the Amorites where Joshua asked for an extra long day to finish Smiting the Enemy so God made the Sun "stand still over Gibeon" until the battle was over; Sodom and Gomorrah being obliterated, and Lot's wife being turned into a pillar of salt; the Tower of Babel "confusion of languages" incident; all the awful shit that happened to poor Job; and the eclipse that supposedly happened when Jesus died.

Oh, and I forgot to tell you -- the next time Planet 7x is scheduled to visit in 2021, and that's going to usher in the End Times as per the Book of Revelation, so that gives us something to look forward to.  How a large planet could generate the Seas Turning to Blood and Apocalyptic Horsepersons and Dragons With Seven Heads and Ten Crowns, I have no idea, but apparently it can.

Which brings up a question I've always had; why would a dragon have seven heads but ten crowns?  By my math that means it has three crowns left over.  What would it do with those?  Put them on heads that already had crowns?  That image is appallingly asymmetrical.  Stack them on its tail?  Carry them in a dragon-sized backpack?  Maybe it doesn't wear all its crowns at once, and swaps out the spares when one of the crowns is at the cleaners, or something.  I dunno.

But I digress.

Anyhow, I encourage you to visit Broussard's website and read about it for yourself, because I can't possibly explain it fully enough for you to get the whole picture.  There are also excellent illustrations, including one of the Earth being zapped by a bolt of lightning from a very evil and threatening-looking orange planet, in the fashion of the Emperor trying to fry Luke Skywalker at the end of Return of the Jedi.

So thanks to A. J. for sending me the idea, especially given that it originates with a Hometown Boy and references two people I actually know.  I'm going to need a double scotch to recover from the brain trauma of wading through the site, but that's not A. J.'s fault.

I mean, I think it wasn't A. J.'s fault.  Considering some of the stuff she writes, this could well be a diabolical plot to short-circuit important parts of my brain.  *gives A. J. a suspicious side-eye*  Maybe it's all part of a conspiracy against me.

Or maybe it's just the influence of Planet 7x approaching.  Who the hell knows.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is about a subject near and dear to my heart; the possibility of intelligent extraterrestrial life.  In The Three-Body Problem, Chinese science fiction writer Cixin Liu takes an interesting angle on this question; if intelligent life were discovered in the universe -- maybe if it even gave us a visit -- how would humans react?

Liu examines the impact of finding we're not alone in the cosmos from political, social, and religious perspectives, and doesn't engage in any pollyanna-ish assumptions that we'll all be hunky-dory and ascend to the next plane of existence.  What he does think might happen, though, makes for fascinating reading, and leaves you pondering our place in the universe for days after you turn over the last page.

[Note: if you purchase this book from the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Trip to the stars

Because the news down here on Earth in the last few days is making me angry, frustrated, depressed, or all three simultaneously, in today's post I'm going to go to my Happy Place, which is: outer space.

This all comes up not only because of the goings-on I'm exposed to every time I read the news, but because of a loyal reader of Skeptophilia who sent me a link to a wonderful article by Nola Taylor Redd in Astronomy magazine online entitled, "The Outer Solar System Keeps Getting Weirder."  In it we find out that recent research has shown that our home system is not nearly as orderly or predictable as we thought it was back when I was in grade school and remembering the mnemonic "My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us Nine Pies" gave you all of the planets in order, and that was pretty much that.

First, we have the discovery of a small icy planet (or dwarf planet; the astronomers aren't exactly sure yet) called L91, which has a highly elliptical orbit varying from 50 Astronomical Units (an AU is the average distance from the Sun to the Earth) to 1,430.  Not only does L91 have an odd orbit, the orbital trajectory isn't stable.  "Its orbit is changing in quite a remarkable way," said astrophysicist Michele Bannister of Queen's University Belfast at the American Astronomical Society’s Division for Planetary Sciences Conference in Pasadena, California.  "There are minute changes in the object’s orbit that could come from the passing gravity of other stars or interactions with the hypothetical Planet Nine."

Artist's conception of the Sun as viewed from Sedna (a dwarf planet three times more distant than Neptune) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I remember when the whole Planet Nine thing first was proposed, right around the time I was an undergraduate student of physics at the University of Louisiana.  Two of my teachers, Daniel Whitmire and John Matese, had proposed the periodic disturbance of comets in the Oort Cloud by a large planet outside the orbit of Pluto as a mechanism for periodic mass extinctions (the idea being that the planet, as it passes through the Oort Cloud, interacts gravitationally with the comets, slingshotting some of them in toward the inner Solar System, and increasing the likelihood of an impact with the Earth and a resultant catastrophe for us Earthlings).  Apparently, Whitmire and Matese are still at it, and have been vindicated at least so far as the existence of Planet Nine; earlier this year Konstantin Batygin of the California Institute of Technology announced independent evidence of a large planet that was perturbing the orbit of dwarf planets in the distant reaches of the Solar System.

So that's pretty cool.  I mean, not the comets striking the Earth and obliterating everything part, but the odd stuff in the far reaches of the Solar System part.

To further explore my Happy Place, I then went to the Hubble Telescope image gallery, and found the following extremely cool photographs, further emphasizing that although things can get ugly down here on Earth, we live in a gorgeous universe.  Here are a few of my favorites.  All images are courtesy of NASA/Hubble Space Telescope and are in the public domain.

A supernova in the galaxy NGC3021

The Helix Nebula

A supernova remnant in the constellation Cassiopeia

The Sombrero Galaxy, NGC 4594

The Whirlpool Galaxy, M51

There.  I don't know about you, but I feel much better now.  The idea that there are billions of stars out there, many of which probably host intelligent life, is a real source of comfort to me.  Especially considering that just by the law of averages, some of them must get by without doing the stupid stuff we do down here on Earth.