Nibiru: The Doomsday Planet That Keeps Not Arriving

The Story

The end of the world has been scheduled many times. One of the most persistent versions involves a planet called Nibiru, also known as Planet X. The story says it is a large world on a long, looping orbit that will soon sweep through the inner solar system, bringing earthquakes, floods or a direct collision.

NASA's Ask an Astrobiologist service, which received thousands of questions about it before 2012, traced the story to two sources. The first was writer Zecharia Sitchin, who claimed in books such as The Twelfth Planet (1976) to have translated Sumerian texts describing a planet called Nibiru that orbits the Sun every 3,600 years.

"Nibiru does not exist." (Jeff Mangum, National Radio Astronomy Observatory, 2012)

The second was Nancy Lieder, a self-described psychic who said on her website that aliens from the Zeta Reticuli star system had warned her that Earth was in danger from Planet X. According to NASA's page, the catastrophe was first predicted for May 2003. When nothing happened, the date moved to December 2012 and was tied to the end of a cycle in the Maya calendar.

Scholars of the ancient Near East reject the starting point. NASA's Q&A notes that Nibiru is a name from Babylonian astrology, sometimes linked to the god Marduk, and that experts who actually read Mesopotamian texts find no Sumerian planet of that kind. The Sumerians, it adds, did not even know the planets orbit the Sun.

Then there is the simple problem of visibility. A planet big enough and close enough to threaten Earth would be bright in the night sky long before it arrived. NASA's Q&A points out that more than 100,000 amateur astronomers watch the sky, and none has reported seeing it. Its gravity would also tug on the orbits of Earth and Mars, which are tracked very precisely using signals from spacecraft.

Astronomers have also looked directly. In 2014 NASA announced results from its Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE), which imaged nearly 750 million asteroids, stars and galaxies across the whole sky. A study by Penn State astronomer Kevin Luhman found no object the size of Saturn or larger out to 10,000 astronomical units from the Sun, and nothing larger than Jupiter out to 26,000. One astronomical unit is the distance from Earth to the Sun. "The outer solar system probably does not contain a large gas giant planet, or a small, companion star," Luhman said.

The NRAO, a U.S. radio astronomy observatory, put it more bluntly when a reader asked for pictures of Nibiru in 2012. "Nibiru does not exist," astronomer Jeff Mangum replied, calling it one of many hoaxes that "use incorrect or misinterpreted astronomical information to propagate misinformation."

Dec. 21, 2012, came and went. New dates have since circulated online, and each one has also passed. That is perhaps the strongest evidence of all.

One caution: some astronomers today are seriously investigating whether a still-undiscovered planet might lie in the far outer solar system, well beyond Neptune. That hypothetical world, if it exists, would be extremely distant and pose no danger to Earth. It has nothing to do with the Nibiru doomsday story.