We were promised the end of the world again. The previous one, I remember, was in 2012, but for some reason the light did not end then. And now the Earth is full of rumors that the planet Nibiru is rushing towards us at full steam. Is it true or not? Let's dot the i's in this question.
First of all: is it possible that an unknown celestial body exists in the solar system? Oh yeah. We have already talked about the Kuiper belt and the huge Oort cloud, in which such bodies are a dime a dozen. And we also recently wrote about a very interesting asteroid, which has been familiar to mankind since 2011, but only recently we managed to see it in all its details - and scientists were stunned.
Could this body be a large enough planet? Of course. The question of a planet beyond the orbit of Neptune, which will take the place of the demoted Pluto, is far from closed.
Could an unknown body invade us from the distant outskirts of the solar system? Yes. All long-period (with a period of thousands of years) comets do this.
Now let's combine these conditions. Could an unknown planet-sized body come so close to Earth as to threaten a collision?
This has never happened in the past several billion years. And the ancient Sumerians, whose texts mention the planet Nibiru, could not see this either.
Let's say that such a planet is approaching the Earth. What will happen? Its gravity will lead to chaos the swarm of asteroids surrounding our planet. In these conditions, such a bombardment awaits the cradle of humanity, next to which a pebble will appear as a harmless fireworks display, which, as is commonly believed, killed the dinosaurs (however, its destructive role is also disputed). But the Earth does not keep any traces of such cataclysms since the formation of the Moon. The moon, by the way, also does not store, despite the fact that there is almost no erosion on it.
Furthermore. Celestial mechanics is a very precise science. The orbits of the planets are very carefully studied. A periodic approach to a large celestial body would inevitably leave a mark in the Earth's orbital motion. And this trail could not be overlooked. But he is not.
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And yet let us imagine for a moment that such a planet exists and is approaching. Could it suddenly grow in front of our eyes?
No. To paraphrase the classics, planets don't fly like birds. It is true that, by earthly standards, they move at tremendous speeds (and some stars, by the way, even faster), but on the scale of interplanetary space, they slowly float across space. Pluto, say, makes one revolution around the Sun in almost 250 Earth years. How can you not remember the joke in the now fashionable genre of "pie": "Pluto was opened and closed, a type error, this and that. And on Pluto, by the way, not a year has passed since then!"
So, even if such a planet approached the Earth, it would do it rather slowly. And even on the distant approaches, it would have made a rustle in the orbits of the surrounding bodies. Let's repeat: celestial mechanics is an extremely exact science. Recall that the planet Neptune was first discovered by the anomalies that its attraction brought to the motion of Uranus. Astronomers made the calculation, pointed the telescope at the desired point - and saw Neptune! It was in the middle of the 19th century.
Today, experts are calculating the orbits of tiny spacecraft so that, using the gravity of several planets to accelerate, they go to Saturn or Pluto. In addition, telescopes scan the sky in many directions every day. And, of course, they would have discovered an unknown object or a "non-standard" position of the known ones. It is impossible not to notice a large planet in the inner regions of the solar system. It is impossible, with a capital "H".
What did the Sumerians mean when they spoke of Nibiru? After all, these gentlemen knew a lot about astronomy and mathematics. It's pretty hard to say for sure. The mentions of Nibiru are fragmentary and are found only in myths. And myths are much older than the achievements of astronomy.
The priests of royal Babylon, of course, knew the sky accessible to the naked eye like the back of their fingers and would not confuse Jupiter or Mercury with anything. But the legends of the gods were composed at a time when they had not even heard of the "eternal city". In our libraries, there are also many myths about the structure of the heavens and the Earth, but we are not saying that they are the authority of all our astronomy?
And most importantly: we know immeasurably more than the ancient Sumerians. Why is the stereotype so stable that the ancients were wiser than us is a question for culturologists and psychologists. But hardly anyone would agree to switch to, say, medical technologies of that time. Why should we trust astronomical information of many thousands of years ago - and even fragmentary and stated in myths - more than our own?
Humanity did not create science to be afraid of its own shadow. No Nibiru exists. Not a single planet since the youth of the solar system and the formation of the moon has not approached the Earth at a dangerous distance. And if an object of this size and approaching us, astronomers would have known about it a long time ago.
The twenty-third of September will be the twenty-fourth.