The Dark Star: The Planet X Evidence (19 page)

¹
B. Harder “Water for the Rock: Did Earth's Oceans come from the
Heavens?” Science News 23 March 2002; Vol. 161, No. 12 Thanks to Lee Covino

²
A. Delsemme “An Argument for the cometary origin of the
biosphere” American Scientist 89 (Sept.-Oct.) 2001; pp432-442 [cited in (1)]

³
M. Drake & K. Righter “Determining the composition of the
Earth” Nature 416 (7th March) 2002; pp39-44 [cited in (1)]

⁴
A. Morbidelli,
et al.
“Source regions and timescales for the
delivery of water to the Earth” Meteoritics and Planetary Science 35 2000;
pp1309-1320 [cited in (1)]

⁵
L. Mullen “Borne Bone Dry” 17th February 2004, with thanks to
Shad Bolling,
http://www.astrobio.net/news/article833.html

⁶
Astrobiology News “A Taste for Comet Water” 25th May 2001
http://nai.arc.nasa.gov/news_stories/news_detail.cfm?ID=154

⁷
Z. Sitchin “The Twelfth Planet” Avon 1976

⁸
L. David "Long-Destroyed Fifth Planet May Have Caused Lunar
Cataclysm, Researchers Say"
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/solarsystem/fifth_planet_020318.html
18th March 2002

⁹
J. d'Arc “Space Travellers and the Genesis of the Human Form” p29
The Book Tree 2000

¹⁰
I. Semeniuk "Neptune Attacks!" pp26-9 New Scientist 7th
April 2001

¹¹
J. Augereau & J. Papaloizou, A&A, astroph/0310732, 2003

¹²
A. Quillen, P. Varniere, I. Minchev & A. Frank, AJ, 2004

¹³
C. Grady et al, AJ, 122, p3396, 2001

¹⁴
D. Koerner & S. LeVay "Here be Dragons: The Scientific
Quest for Extraterrestrial Life" pp20-1, 43, Oxford University Press 2000

¹⁵
Horizon' BBC2, “Snowball Earth” Shown on 22nd February 2001

¹⁶
G. Marcy & P. Butler "Hunting Planets Beyond"
pp43-7 Astronomy March 2000

¹⁷
Hazel Muir, "Brown Dwarf may Someday Harbour Habitable
Planets" 8th February 2005,
http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6977

¹⁸
A. Alford "The Phoenix Solution" pp171-4, Hodder &
Stoughton 1998

¹⁹
A. Lloyd "Planet X: Past and Present", pp32-7, UFO
Magazine January 2004

²⁰
A. Pike “Exoplanets: What's New?” , p72-3, UFO Magazine, February
2004

²¹
J. Foust "Bizarre new planets puzzle astronomers"
Spaceflight Now 10th January 2000

²²
Planetary Correctness' Associated Press, 9th January 2001
http://www.aci.net/kalliste/

²³
The Similarities of the Planets (and Other Celestial Objects)”
http://www.livingcosmos.com/celestial.htm
,
With thanks to Lloyd Pye

²⁴
J. Kelly Beatty “Bigorbit Object Confounds Dynamicists”, 5th
April 2001, with thanks to Frank Cordell and Theo Kermandis
http://www.skypub.com/news/news.shtml#bigorbit

²⁵
L. Moulton Howe “Deep Impact Spectra: Carbonate, PAHs and Some
Amino Precursors in Comet Tempel I” Interview with Dr. C. Lisse, Professor of
Physics, 12/8/05
http://www.earthfiles.com/news/news.cfm?ID=960&category=Science
With thanks to Lee Covino

12. The Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt

Scientific
evidence for the existence of Planet X is growing. That is not just my opinion,
it is a fact. More and more astronomers appear to be incorporating into their
thinking the possibility that something big is playing around with the cometary
bodies that make up the Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt (sometimes more simply known as
the 'Kuiper Belt').

This large belt of planetesimals was first proposed by a British
researcher called Kenneth Edgeworth. His idea was first published in 1943, but
there was a more significant paper published in the Monthly Notices of the
Royal Astronomical Society in 1949 outlining his ideas. Two years later, the
same proposal was made by the American astronomer Gerard Kuiper, "in a
chapter which he had contributed to a book edited by J. Allen Hynek".
¹

The now prevalent term 'Kuiper Belt' seems to have been first
coined by Scott Tremaine in 1988, and was consequently used in the first paper
describing the historic discovery of a solar system object beyond Pluto. This
discovery was made by Dave Jewitt and Jane Luu, who entitled their paper
"Discovery of the candidate Kuiper Belt Object 1992 QB1". The name
quickly caught on.
¹

As a result of the confusion caused by the controversial naming of
this belt beyond Neptune, different researchers call it different things.
Because I have a misplaced sense of patriotic duty towards all things British,
I will call it the Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt, and objects within it
Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt Objects (EKBOs).

The Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt is a sizeable body of planetesimals and
comets, many of which have been herded into stable resonant orbits with Neptune
over time, and lie within poorly-defined bands just beyond this outer gas
giant. Pluto, the outermost planet, could itself be said to be a large EKBO. It
has a resonant orbit with Neptune such that it avoids the larger planet, even
though it periodically crosses its orbital path. In theory, all of the objects
in the Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt should have orbits that are in some way related to
the known outer planets.

But, as it turns out, they don't.

'Ten in a Bed...'

Although the sheer scale of the belt is immense, there is a
problem of missing mass. The Belt shows a surprisingly large deficiency of
predicted objects out to about 50 Astronomical Units, a fact that puzzles
astronomers. Even though there will be times when some of these objects
interact with Neptune in such a way that they are eventually ejected from the
solar system, there still seems to be too few of them. The astronomers Petit,
Morbidelli and Valsecchi theorized that primordial planetary embryos up to the
mass of Earth could have spent time in the Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt, flinging the
normal EKBOs around, and thus leading to a massive loss of comets.
²

So where are those planets now? If they were still orbiting just
beyond Neptune they surely would have been found by Clyde Tombaugh over 60
years ago, as he thoroughly searched the sky for similar planets to Pluto. If
they are still out there, then they are further away than this, having migrated
out. It is thought that there might be Mars-sized bodies embedded in the
Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt that have so far evaded detection.

Edgeworth-Kuiper Objects exhibit different orbital properties,
falling naturally into sub-categories of 'classical belt' objects and
'scattered disc' objects, with further sub-divisions looming as the database
of objects increases.
³
This is a complex set of solar system objects
whose system of classification is far from straightforward. The more extreme
examples of these objects may be indicative of an unknown influence affecting
the belt, as we shall see.

The Belt itself lies predominantly in the plane of the ecliptic,
along with most of the rest of the solar system. But some of the EKBOs are
inclined to the ecliptic, as is Pluto, and thus create a diffuse band in the
sky. This is quite different from the more distant Oort Cloud of comets, which
covers the sky in a spherical way: long-period comets arriving from the Oort
Cloud do so from all regions in the heavens. Although, as we have seen, there
are those who argue that the 'random' positioning of these comets around the
solar system is nothing of the sort!

Between the Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt (which is more like an asteroid
belt of comets) and the Oort Cloud, there is an immense gap of essentially
nothing. This, I would suggest, is significant in itself. It implies the
presence of something undiscovered.

Our present technological capability has allowed astronomers to
detect some of the Edgeworth-Kuiper Objects that lie nearest to the orbits of
Pluto and Neptune. Trying to pinpoint these hidden objects in the sky is
difficult work, to the extent that objects that are discovered during a
particular sky search are even difficult to confirm during later observation
attempts, despite knowledge of their whereabouts. This is important, because it
can require several observations over time to work out a given object's exact
trajectory, which then allows astronomers to pinpoint the objects position at a
later date.

Only the 'inner' part of the belt is currently within the limits
of our observational capacity. But even so, astronomers are seeing examples of
the more distant 'scattered disc' populations, as they are sighted during their
perihelion passages just beyond Neptune. These distant objects are only
observable at their closest approaches to the sun, implying that there are a
great many more so-called 'scattered disc objects' beyond.
³

A system of classification for newly-discovered solar system
objects is widely in use, and the registering of such objects is managed by the
International Astronomical Union's (IAU) "Central Bureau," based at
the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The
label attached to any given object begins simply with the year it was
discovered. Then, a letter is applied for each half-monthly interval in that
year, ignoring I and Z. Then, a second letter is applied denoting the order in
which reports are officially received.
¹

As the number of new solar system objects discovered each month
steadily grew, the need arose to supplement that system with a suffix number.
That is how we have arrived at a name like 2000 CR105. It was discovered in
February 2000, and was one of several hundred similar official reports of
Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt Objects.

The Edgeworth-Kuiper Objects 2000 CR105 and 1995TL8 are
'scattered-disc objects', and exhibit orbits that are difficult to explain
dynamically. They are potentially highly significant, because their orbits seem
to be 'de-coupled' from the influence of the giant planets in the solar system.
The implications seem to the astronomers, including Brett Gladman, to be
significant.
³

His team have speculated that the anomalous scattered disc objects
of the Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt have been subject to gravitational forces 'out
there', expanding their perihelia distances beyond that allowed by normal
interactions with the classical EKBO 'shepherd', Neptune. The researchers offer
a number of possibilities to explain this, all involving large objects passing
through, or even currently resident in the Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt. These include
perturbations caused by passing stars (see also
⁴
, now-absent
primordial embryos passing through the belt as they were ejected from the solar
system (as detailed above), and, of course, Planet X (and even Planet XI,
Planet XII, etc.) lying undiscovered within the EKB.
³

One of the team, Matthew Holman, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre
for Astrophysics, made no bones of the fact that he thought it entirely
possible that a Mars-sized body might lie within the extended Edgeworth-Kuiper
Belt, and that such a body could easily have escaped detection thus far,
despite the infrared sky searches carried out to date.
⁵
This
contrasted sharply with the previous scientific attitude towards the case for a
substantial Planet X.