Almost certainly, it is not. According to one theory, based upon a tenuous analysis of obscure ancient Sumerian texts, the ancient peoples of the Near East were aware of a planet which follows a drawn-out 3600 year orbit, passing near Earth once during that time period. Moreover, according to the theory, we’re due for one of those passes very soon now. Fortunately, there is no physical evidence whatsoever to support this theory.
– The Theory of Nibiru –
The idea of Nibiru originated with Nancy Lieder, who claimed during the mid-1990s she was passed information by Zeta Reticuli aliens that excitement about the Hale-Bopp comet was a deliberate misdirection to lull people into a false sense of security while a much greater threat, Nibiru, approached the inner solar system. Lieder predicted that Nibiru would arrive in 2003; this date, obviously, proved incorrect. However, information is still available from her website, ZetaTalk.
A more sophisticated theory of Nibiru has been provided by Zecharia Sitchin, a Middle Eastern-born journalist who believes that the ancient Sumerians were aware of a planet today’s scientists have not yet found (or are suppressing evidence of), which they called Nibiru. Sumerian astronomers, Sitchin claims, knew that Nibiru, Nibiru’s moons, and another planet, Tiamat, had been involved in a collision, which destroyed Tiamat. Part of Tiamat became the Earth; the remaining debris broke apart to create the Asteroid Belt.
Sitchin goes further. He claims that Nibiru is home to another intelligent species, which has been plundering Earth’s resources for a half-million years and were known to the Sumerians as Anunnaki. The Anunnaki created the early humans from lower primate species for use as slaves, but left after an interstellar war occurred around 2000 BC (when the ancient Sumerian city of Ur was destroyed, possibly during a skirmish in this greater war). Details of his theory have been published in a variety of books between the 1970s and the present, the latest of which is “The End of Days: Armageddon and Prophecies of the Return.”
– A Lack of Evidence –
One thing is clear: Those who say that Nibiru exists have been unable to point to any meaningful published debate on this subject within the scientific community, nor have they submitted any physical evidence which has stood up to careful scientific scrutiny. If Nibiru really were poised to begin its once-in-a-few-millennia traverse of the inner solar system, it ought to be easily visible to the naked eye either now, or at least very soon – and certainly it should be possible to locate Nibiru in a telescope.
In addition, there have been devastating critiques of Sitchin’s analysis of Sumerian astronomy; Michael Heiser, for instance, points out that the single document on which Sitchin bases his claims actually says nothing explicit about astronomy (nor does it correspond to other astronomical texts left by the Sumerians), and, most importantly, all of the other evidence about Sumerian astronomy suggests that they were aware of just five planets. None of these were Nibiru. One would assume that, if the Sumerian civilization really were the product of systematic alien intervention, there would be far more references to this fact.
More to the point, however, it’s worth looking at why it’s safe to assume that a roughly Earth-sized planet like Nibiru can’t plausibly be found in a 6000-year orbit around our own Sun.
– Nibiru and the Solar System –
The current form of Earth and of the solar system simply does not support Sitchin’s theories about ancient astronomy. It seems extraordinarily implausible that any collision so devastating that it separated one large planet into remnants in the form of Earth and the Asteroid Belt would not have left anything large enough and stable enough to support life (i.e. the Earth). Moreover, such a theory does not explain why some of the debris ended up in Earth’s orbit, and the rest ended up in the Asteroid Belt, with a space in between that is essentially empty except for the planet Mars.
Second, it is hard to imagine a large planet having an orbit as great as the one attributed to Nibiru. The outer solar system is mostly empty, but beyond the gas giants themselves (with orbits that take less than a century), all of the dwarf planets of the Kuiper Belt and the scattered disk regions, like Pluto and Eris, can’t even rival our own Moon in terms of size. There are objects beyond this, but it is doubtful they would be any larger – get out too far, and the Sun’s gravity simply isn’t strong enough to hold a very large object to a regular orbit.
Finally, our solar system, from what we can guess based on current observations, is a pretty stable place nowadays. That wasn’t so billions of years ago, when the planets were forming (and still molten, in most cases), and there were hundreds of large objects zipping around in irregular orbits. Things have settled down since then, however. Jupiter’s massive gravity tends to keep the system in line: Asteroids and comets that get too close are either pulled in, to crash into that planet, or have their orbits disrupted so that they are flung out of the solar system.
If a giant planet named Nibiru were pushing through the solar system every several thousand years, however, it would disrupt all of the orbits of the planets as it went. More comets and asteroids would be pushed around the system, resulting in large impacts on Earth – which do happen, but nothing like every 3600 years, which they would if they were caused by Nibiru. (Major impacts tend to happen every few tens of millions of years, not every few thousand years.) Moons might be pushed out of orbit, and planets’ orbits would be altered, resulting in enormous and possibly devastating climate changes on Earth. We have no evidence in the archaeological or fossil record to support sudden, occasionally drastic changes every few thousand years.
Of course, Nibiru’s orbit would have to be altered just as drastically as it altered all of the other planets’ orbits, too. So it wouldn’t have a 3600 year orbit on anything like a regular basis. Sooner or later, such a planet would either be pushed too far in one direction (so that it crashed into the Sun, or perhaps Jupiter), or too far in the other direction, so that it moved into an even longer orbit.
The Nibiru theory does bear certain similarities to another scientific theory, that of Nemesis – a brown dwarf star which might pass by the solar system in a multi-million-year orbit. Advocates of Nemesis, too, have suggested that the implicit evidence for the existence of this star lies in the periodic cometary devastations of Earth’s orbit, which might occur whenever Nemesis disrupts the Oort cloud or even the Kuiper Belt. As with Nibiru, there is no evidence to suggest that Nemesis exists. Of course, that evidence could be discovered tomorrow – and would then require a complete reassessment of existing theories.
– But What If…? –
The pro-Nibiru community has probably got one thing bang on: If there really was a planet poised to unleash astronomical and biological devastation by swinging through the inner solar system, and we had just learned about this in the past few years, then very likely governments would not be in a rush to tell their citizens about it. They would want to come up with a plan first – and it would be difficult to have a plan for something as celestially huge as that.
The problem is, however, that the vast majority of astronomers have either no or very little connection to the central structures of government that would be responsible for keeping this secret. Most of them are either amateurs or at least academics. The conspiracy required to suppress such knowledge would be breathtakingly huge. Which, I imagine, is very little comfort, for those readers who already believe that the moon landings were faked or that the government is already suppressing widespread evidence of contact with extraterrestrial space travellers. If it was doing that, I suppose it just might be able to suppress evidence of Nibiru as well.
