Hey Gramps,
I am curious if you have ever heard of ” Planet X ” also known as the Planet Niburu (Nibiru)? I was talking to my Brother about it tonight. He heard about it in his Gospel Doctrine class in the Mormon Church. I am curious what do you think about it?
Kami

Dear Kami,
The planet Nibiru seems to have resulted from the collision of two stories. There are ancient Sumerian texts, written in cuneiform, dating back to about 4000 BC that tell the story of a race of beings called the Anunnaki, who came to Earth about 450,000 years ago from a planet in our solar system called Nibiru. They engineered the human race to mine gold for them, which they needed to save their planet. When they left the earth, the left the humans that they engineered in charge of the earth.
Scientists of our day have long speculated that there may be an unknown planet – a Planet X – somewhere out beyond the orbit of Pluto that would account for the anomalies they were detecting in the orbits of Neptune and Uranus. Some unseen body seems to be tugging at them. The finding was reported in the June 19, 1982 edition of the New York Times:—

“Something out there beyond the furthest reaches of the known solar system is tugging at Uranus and Neptune. A gravitational force keeps perturbing the two giant planets, causing irregularities in their orbits. The force suggests a presence far away and unseen, a large object, the long-sought Planet X. Astronomers are so certain of this planet’s existence that they have already named it “Planet X – the 10th Planet.”

This anomalous body was first spotted in 1983 by IRAS (Infrared Astronomical Satellite), according to news stories. The Washington Post reported:

“A heavenly body possibly as large as the giant 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 aboard the U.S. infrared astronomical satellite. So mysterious is the object that astronomers do not know if it is a planet, a giant comet, a nearby ‘protostar’ that never got hot enough to become a star, a distant galaxy so young that it is still in the process of forming its first stars or a galaxy so shrouded in dust that none of the light cast by its stars ever gets through.”

Since 1983 other astronomers have also identified the body found by IRAS. An article in MSNBC on October, 1999 reported—

“Two teams of researchers have proposed the existence of an unseen planet or a failed star circling the sun at a distance of more than 2 trillion miles, far beyond the orbits of the nine known planets… Planetary scientist at Britain’s Open University, speculates that the object could be a planet larger than Jupiter.”

And in December, 2000, Space Daily reported on “Another Candidate For ‘Planet X’ Spotted.” Yet another source, the National Optical Astronomy Observatory, on July 2 2001, reported—

“Astronomers from Lowell Observatory, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the Large Binocular Telescope Observatory have discovered an icy planetary body orbiting the Sun beyond Neptune in the Kuiper Belt roughly equal in size to Pluto’s moon Charon. ‘This object is intrinsically the brightest Kuiper Belt Object (KBO) found so far,’ says Lowell Observatory Director Robert Millis, leader of the survey team. ‘The exact diameter of 2001 KX76 depends on assumptions that astronomers make about how its brightness relates to its size. Traditional assumptions make it the biggest by a significant amount, while others make it larger by at least 5 percent.’

“2001 KX76 was discovered in the course of the Deep Ecliptic Survey, a NASA-funded search for KBOs being conducted by the Lowell-MIT-LBT team using the National Science Foundation’s telescopes at Kitt Peak National Observatory near Tucson, AZ, and Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. The team spotted 2001 KX76 in deep digital images of the southern sky taken with the 4-meter Blanco Telescope at Cerro Tololo on May 22 by James L. Elliot of MIT and Lawrence H. Wasserman of Lowell Observatory. 2001 KX76 is currently at a distance of just over 6.4 billion kilometers (4 billion miles) from the Sun. Its orbit is inclined by approximately 20 degrees with respect to the orbital plane of the major planets, but the detailed shape of its orbit remains uncertain. Available evidence suggests that the newly discovered KBO may be in an orbital resonance with Neptune, orbiting the Sun three times for each time that Neptune completes four orbits.”

The romanticists have given the name, Nibiru, to the proto-planet, 2001 KX76, and that is the extent of the connection.
Gramps