The Dark Star: The Planet X Evidence (7 page)

The term ‘Planet X’ was first coined by Percival Lowell, who
founded the Lowell Observatory at Flagstaff, Arizona. Lowell is also famous for
his interpretation of perceived markings on the surface of Mars, his ‘canals’.
But, despite the tarnishing of his reputation (which resulted from his belief
in intelligent life on Mars, creating such marvels of extraterrestrial
engineering), Lowell was a great scientist.

Originally, the scientific speculation about Lowell’s undiscovered
Planet X was built upon observed ‘wobbles’ in the orbits of the outer planets,
Uranus and Neptune, based upon data gathered over the previous century by
astronomers. At that time, it was not considered unlikely that more planets
remained to be discovered. Science seemed to be enjoying a golden age and great
discoveries were changing people’s lives for the better. Nothing seemed
impossible. This massive perturbing influence at the edge of the solar system
was just a new challenge beckoning for yet another great discovery.

As it turned out, a new planet was discovered -- but not the one
anticipated. Clyde Tombaugh’s discovery of Pluto in 1930 was made while he
searched for Planet X at the Lowell Observatory. Tombaugh was a young amateur
astronomer who had been recruited by Vesto Slipher, the director of Lowell
Observatory. The ex-farmboy from Kansas pored over hundreds of photographic
plates searching for Lowell’s Planet X, a time - consuming and laborious
process.

Eventually, he was rewarded on 18th February 1930. However, it
turned out that Pluto is too small to have been the object perturbing the outer
planets. Tombaugh continued his search for another 13 years, but failed to find
Planet X. His sky searches were, by the end of those 13 years, so comprehensive
that astronomers assumed that no Planet X could still await discovery.
¹

The claim that Planet X is still out there has always been a very
controversial one among astronomers, and all hope that it may have a grounding
in fact seemed to have been killed off by E. Myles Standish, Jr. at NASA's Jet
Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, CA. Standish publicly expressed his
doubts that there had ever really been problems with the orbits of Uranus and
Neptune. He argued persuasively that previous anomalies over the past two
centuries were explainable by "...systematic errors in the observations,
and, in some cases by faulty data reduction and interpretation".
²

Standish wrote a paper in 1993 outlining his theoretical work,
based upon improved measurements of the masses of the outer planets during the
Voyager spacecraft fly-bys. He claimed that the effect described by Lowell
could now be negated, and that Lowell had been quite wrong to attribute the
alleged wobbles to a massive undiscovered planet.
¹
Yet, Pluto had
been discovered in the location predicted by Lowell for Planet X, in the
zodiacal constellation of Gemini, even though it was evidently not the sought
after massive planet. This was simply coincidence in the eyes of Standish and
others, and the thoroughness of Tombaugh’s sky searches 60 years before was
seen as further evidence that Planet X was dead in the water.

This opinion has held sway since Standish’s influential paper in
1993 (at least until relatively recently, when new anomalies emerged). However,
before 1993, many scientists had continued to ponder openly upon the
possibility of a Planet beyond Pluto.

The late Carl Sagan, a popular and brilliant scientist from
Cornell University, described the potential for a dark sister companion
orbiting the sun back in 1985. Sagan acknowledged the speculation surrounding a
proposed Nemesis ‘star’ orbiting the sun at a great distance. He even proposed
a fictional scenario where ancient peoples mythologized this ‘Death Star’ as
the sun’s Dark Sister.
³
The ‘Death Star’ ― presumably taking
its name from the equally fictitious moon-like battle station of George Lucas’s
Star Wars trilogy ― could periodically bombard the solar system with
comets when its elliptical orbit caused it to brush through the comet clouds.
This, in turn, could create a periodic extinction cycle.

This idea was not a particularly new one, even in 1985. A
controversial article in Newsweek (28th June 1982) described the possibility
that there may be a binary dark star at some considerable distance beyond the
orbit of Pluto. Furthermore, a tenth planet might be orbiting around this
binary system:

“A 'dark companion' could produce the unseen force that seems to
tug at Uranus and Neptune, speeding them up at one point in their orbits and
holding them back as they pass...(John) Anderson (of JPL.) thinks the best bet
is a dark star orbiting at least 50 billion miles beyond Pluto, which is 3.6
billion miles from the sun. It is most likely either a brown dwarf ― a lightweight
star that never attained the critical mass to ignite ― or a neutron star,
the remnants of a normal sun that has burned out and collapsed”.
⁴

Catastrophism was enjoying a revival in the early 1980s. It was
around this time that the world was coming to grips with the notion that
dinosaurs had been wiped out by an asteroid or comet impact, as proposed by
Luis and Walter Alvarez.
⁵
It was a phenomenal notion, based upon the
remarkable quantities of iridium found at the K-T boundary. In 1984 two
paleontologists, David Raup and John Sepkoski, then proposed that there was a
pattern to extinction events on Earth.
⁶
A cycle of 26 million years
appeared to have emerged from their data.

This
seemed to call for some kind of cosmic-scale periodicity to explain it. The
idea of a ‘Nemesis’ dark companion orbiting the sun every 26 million years was
proposed in Nature by two independent teams of physicists; Daniel Whitmire and
Albert Jackson
⁷
, and M. Davis,
et al.
⁸
The orbit of this
massive companion, a ‘black dwarf’, might pass through the Oort Cloud
periodically, showering the solar system with comets, and causing a clockwork
extinction pattern in tune with Raup and Sepkoski’s data.
⁹

One
can see the amount of speculation about Planet X, and/or a distant ‘Dark Star’,
was quite considerable in the mid-eighties, prior to the sceptical paper by E.
Myles Standish. But doubts about the proposed Nemesis object were already
widespread among many mainstream scientists, and the catastrophists were in a
minority to begin with. The fact was that such an object had not been
discovered by the 1983 IRAS survey, which had methodically scanned the heavens
in the infrared band seeking invisible, but warm objects. This sky survey, it
was widely argued (and still is...) should have found any undiscovered planets.

After
all, the infrared telescope which was carried by IRAS (the InfraRed
Astronomical Satellite) was quite capable of seeing ‘through the dust and gas
that obscures stars and other objects when viewed by optical telescopes’.
¹⁰
One would have expected Planet X, if it was out there, to shine like a beacon
in the dark.

In
fact, news did break at the time regarding a ‘sighting’ of Planet X by the IRAS
team, but nothing ever seemed to come of it. The Washington Post science team
broke the story, declaring that “a heavenly body possibly as large as the
planet Jupiter and possibly so close to Earth that it would be part of this
solar system has been found in the direction of the constellation Orion by an
orbiting telescope called the Infrared Astronomical Observatory”.
¹¹

According
to JPL’s Public Relations Office, which was contacted by Zecharia Sitchin in
1984, the finding had been ambiguous. Presumably, was that their way of
accusing a reporter from the Washington Post of overstating the case? This
report in the Washington Post has been reproduced many, many times over the
Internet, and has indeed become the focal point for many who believe that
knowledge of a tenth planet exists within official circles, but has been
withheld from the public.

Part
of that belief no doubt stems from a misguided understanding of the efficacy of
the IRAS sky survey. This has not been helped by members of the mainstream
astronomical community, sometimes talking up the failure of the IRAS study to
detect another solar system planet. This perceived failure is seen as
definitive by many, tolling the death knell for Planet X.

Tom
Chester, who worked on the IRAS project and who has a sceptical attitude
towards the existence of Planet X, once informed me that the coverage of the
inferred sky search was 95% complete. Taken on face value, this appears to
create a big problem for a potential sizable body out there. Patrick Moore
tells us that IRAS discovered no less than 200,000 infrared signatures in the
sky.
¹²
Given this extraordinary amount of data, it is tempting to
conclude that a thorough search for Planet X was essentially completed by IRAS.

But
the disappointment of the IRAS survey could well have been a "false
negative". John Anderson, a distinguished scientist formerly of the
Pioneer programme and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, argued that the survey
could easily have missed Planet X. He explained that there were many objects in
the sky that had infrared signatures similar to those of planets. To truly
pinpoint a possibly unseen planet, its proper motion would have to be
determined. If the motion across the sky of a distant planet were very small
over a period of weeks, or months, then IRAS could easily have missed it.
²

Recently,
I have been informed that this opinion is also shared by the renowned expert on
brown dwarfs, Professor J. Davy Kirkpatrick. He seems optimistic that a brown
dwarf could be discovered between our sun and the nearest known star, Proxima
Centauri. The IRAS survey didn’t detect such a body, of course, but that
doesn’t mean it’s not there. A fellow researcher, John Lee, often working under
the ‘handle’ of ‘Rajasun’ agreed that a dark mass with an insignificant proper
motion across the sky could not have been distinguished from a stationary
object by IRAS. More surprisingly still, he cited an article
¹
that
described how any detection of a possible object with a notable motion across
the sky would have been dismissed as questionable data!

These researchers consider the best chance for the future
discovery of a binary brown dwarf to be NASA's Wide-field Infrared Survey
Explorer (WISE) mission. It may surprise the reader to learn that the hoped-for
discovery of a brown dwarf closer than the sun’s nearest stellar neighbor is
actually one of its main mission goals!
¹⁴

The commitment of funds for WISE flies in the face of the general
negativity among scientists regarding the prospects for a massive solar
companion. This future mission, scheduled for launch in 2008, will be
specifically searching for such an nearby brown dwarf. It is possible that a
brown dwarf might be discovered as a free-floating object in the interstellar
space beyond the solar system, or a cold object could possibly be found
actually orbiting the sun.

Another positive remark about the potential for an undiscovered
planet orbiting relatively closely to the sun emerged when an astrophysics
group from Harvard released details of an anomalous Kuiper Belt Object known as
2000 CR105. One of the team, Dr. Matthew Holman, indicated that this object’s
bizarre orbit might be the result of a massive perturber in the comet clouds
beyond the planetary zone. He went on public record as saying that a Mars-sized
body might "easily" have evaded detection as close as 200 AU.
¹⁵
This clearly flies in the face of the opinion that the IRAS sky survey’s
failure to detect Planet X means that there is no Planet X.

So, there is a lot of scope for being open-minded about the
existence of Planet X. While it evidently does not orbit the sun as close as
the outer planets Neptune and Pluto, you don’t have to move too far away from
the sun before its existence again becomes an open question. There are
theoretical considerations of course, because many astronomers dismiss the
existence of a massive planet out there, because it would cause some problems
for our current models of solar system formation. But the tide is turning as
new discoveries come to light about other star systems.

I recently had an opportunity to ask the space historian and
skeptic James Oberg about NASA’s current attitude towards Planet X, and his
reply was illuminating. He suggested that there probably wasn’t an official
position towards the subject, but that it is considered when relevant to
specific missions, like the proposed Pluto-Kuiper probe. He had seen a renewed
interest in the discoveries in the outer frontier of the solar system in recent
years, which we will dwell on shortly, and was personally excited about the
possibilities emerging.
¹⁶

It
seems that even commentators who are often labeled as skeptics are being won
over to the idea that Planet X could be out there. But that doesn’t stop
astronomers from being very cagey about what they say on this subject. To
openly promote the idea of a major undiscovered planet or brown dwarf in the
scientific literature, is to invoke the wrath of many skeptical scientists.

I
don’t know why this is particularly, but it is evidently true. The science of
astronomy and cosmology can be quite bold and speculative at times, so one
would expect that such ideas ― if properly presented in the literature
― would be welcomed in the same way as, say, new thinking on black holes.
Alas, this does not appear to be so. One can only surmise that the mere
suggestion of the existence of a Planet X suggests greater consequences than
just the advancements of scientific knowledge about our outer solar system.