In 2012, many “yellow” media outlets were fervently scaring us about Nibiru, a planet approaching the Earth (and, simultaneously, the home of reptilians) that would cause the next end of the world. As we already know, the apocalypse did not happen, but Nibiru did not disappear either. Therefore, “disturbing news” about its imminent approach appears repeatedly on various dubious Internet resources.
Of course, this story can only be laughed at. But, interestingly, Nibiru is not the only fictional celestial body that many people once believed in. Moreover, some of them were seriously considered by the scientific community and even included in astronomical reference books. In this article, we will talk about the most famous objects of the Solar System that have never actually existed.
Counter-Earth
Imagine that right on the opposite side of the Earth’s orbit, at the so-called Lagrange point L3, there is another planet, the Counter-Earth. We would not be able to see it, because it would be constantly obscured by the Sun in the sky. And since it receives the same amount of heat as our planet, there would be favorable conditions for life to emerge there, and it could even have its own civilization. And from there, we are close to the next conclusion: UFOs are spaceships of the inhabitants who inhabit them!
Strangely enough, the existence of such a celestial body was first postulated in the fifth century BC by the Pythagoreans, adherents of the ancient Greek philosophical doctrine. They believed that the Counter-Earth was located between the Earth and some invisible “central fire”.
The idea of a Counter-Earth world gained a second wind in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries thanks to the development of science fiction and the emergence of the UFO craze. Many “contactees” claimed that the aliens who visited them came from this world.
Unfortunately, despite the considerable appeal of this idea, the existence of a Counter-Earth planet is physically impossible for several reasons. First, the point L3 is extremely unstable, and the solar system consists not only of the Earth and the Sun, but also of other planets. Therefore, any body on the opposite side of the Earth’s orbit will be thrown out of its position quite quickly by their joint gravitational influence. It is possible that this even happened in reality about 4.5 billion years ago. There is an assumption that the hypothetical planet Theia, the collision with which formed the Moon, originally originated at the L3 point.
Secondly, even if such a planet somehow managed to stay in its position, we would have learned about it long ago. The fact is that celestial bodies move in elliptical rather than circular orbits, and as they approach perihelion, they increase their speed. So, such a body could still be seen from the Earth. Third, its presence would be detected by gravity. Any object with a diameter of more than 160 km at the L3 point would have a significant gravitational effect on other planets, which would certainly be noticed. And finally, spacecraft (for example, STEREO probes) have repeatedly photographed this region and found nothing but emptiness.
Venus moon
As you know, Venus has no moons. And this is a long-standing scientific mystery, because almost all planets in the Solar System have companions. However, if we were to travel back a few centuries, we would find out that a celestial body also orbits Venus. At least, that is what some observers claimed.
The history of Venus’ moon dates back to the mid-17th century, when Italian astronomer Francesco Fontana first reported its sighting. Even though other astronomers failed to spot a single body (and Fontana himself was well known for his penchant for exaggerated descriptions), the story continued after a while. In 1672, Giovanni Cassini also saw a moon of Venus. Fourteen years later, he again reported its presence.
In the eighteenth century, Louis Lagrange, Jacques Montaigne, and Peder Rudquiar allegedly saw the satellite of Venus. The object even got its name. It was named Nate in honor of the Egyptian goddess of hunting and war.
However, during the passage of Venus by the Sun’s disk in June 1761, none of the hundreds of observers managed to see a single satellite. This quickly cooled interest in this issue. The next attempts to find this object were made in the nineteenth century, after the discovery of Phobos and Deimos. But they again ended in nothing. As for the earlier evidence, it was attributed to imperfect technology and optical illusions.
Interestingly, even now, scientists cannot say for sure whether Venus ever had a satellite. According to one rather attractive assumption, it could have been Mercury, which then went on an “independent voyage” through the Solar System. This hypothesis could also explain the absence of satellites on Mercury itself. However, it is not yet consistent with the results of computer modeling. According to another version, the Venusian satellite was destroyed in the distant past as a result of some cataclysmic event that caused the planet to start rotating in the opposite direction.
But even if Venus did have a satellite, it was only in the very distant past. Whatever the astronomers of the 17th and 18th centuries observed could not have had anything to do with it.
Vulcan planet
The year 1846 brought humanity one of the most important discoveries in the history of science. Guided by the calculations of the mathematician Urbain Le Verrier, who analyzed the deviations in the orbit of Uranus, the German astronomer Johann Galle found Neptune, the eighth planet of the Solar System. This discovery, according to a figurative expression, “made at the tip of a pen”, was a brilliant confirmation of the law of gravity.
But Uranus was not the only planet in the Solar System with orbital anomalies. The situation was similar with Mercury, whose perihelion shift could not be explained within the framework of classical Newtonian mechanics. Therefore, Le Verrier came to a quite logical conclusion: it was all about the existence of another, hitherto undiscovered planet orbiting the Sun within the Mercurian orbit. And in 1859, he received a letter from an amateur astronomer, Lescarbault, who reported observing the transit of an unknown object against the background of our luminary. Based on the data he provided, the scientist calculated the orbit and the following year announced the discovery of a new planet, which he named Vulcan.
Initially, thanks to Le Verrier’s authority, the scientific community generally favored his claim, and Lescarbault even received the Legion of Honor for his “discovery”. Later, there were many attempts to see Vulcan. Several amateur astronomers even claimed successful observations, but for the most part, it avoided the eyes of scientists. And when Vulcan was “seen”, the results of the observations contradicted each other. Attempts to find the planet culminated on March 22, 1877, when, according to Le Verrier’s calculations, it was supposed to reappear against the background of the Sun’s disk. Astronomers turned to their telescopes, but saw nothing.
Despite the fiasco, Le Verrier was convinced of his rightness until the end of his life. The Vulcan riddle was solved only after the publication of General Relativity (GR) in 1915. It turned out that the perihelion shift was caused by relativistic effects associated with Mercury’s proximity to the Sun.
Already in our time, there have been speculations about the possibility of a hidden population of asteroids (called volcanoids) whose orbits pass at a very small distance from the Sun. However, neither ground-based observations nor data collected by spacecraft have revealed any signs of such bodies.
Destroyed Phaeton
In 1801, astronomers discovered a previously unknown body whose orbit passes between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. It was named Ceres.
At first, it was recognized as a planet. However, the following year, another body was found in this region, called Pallas. This was followed by the discovery of Juno, Vesta, and, after a short break, many more objects with similar orbits. It became finally clear that it was not a group of several small planets, but a whole belt of many celestial bodies located between Mars and Jupiter. They were called asteroids.
But where did the asteroids come from? Astronomer Heinrich Olbers suggested that they are the fragments of a fifth planet that perished during some kind of catastrophe. This hypothetical object was called Phaeton.
Already in the 20th century, the Phaeton hypothesis was creatively reinterpreted by various authors, effectively turning it into a modern analogue of the Atlantis legend. According to them, there once existed an advanced civilization on the fifth planet that could not cope with the power of technological progress and destroyed its world itself.
Despite the spectacular nature of such assumptions, it is clear that they cannot be true. The modeling results clearly show that no planet could ever exist on the site of the asteroid belt: Jupiter’s powerful gravity would simply not allow it to form. In addition, if we add up all the asteroids, we will get a body whose mass is only 4% of the mass of the Moon, and its mass is known to be 81 times less than the Earth’s. So, asteroids are essentially “construction waste” that has remained unused since the formation of the planets.
To be fair, it is worth mentioning some computer models that suggest that in the distant past, another planet could have existed in the Solar System, not in the place of the Main Asteroid Belt, but between it and Mars. However, the orbit of such an object would not have been stable. After the orbits of the gas giants shifted, gravitational perturbations would most likely simply “throw” the object into the Sun. So, if such a planet did exist, it still cannot have anything to do with the asteroid belt. However, this circumstance does not stop various ufologists who continuing to actively use Phaeton in the context of intriguing stories about aliens.
Planet X
Some time after the discovery of Neptune, astronomers discovered that the mass of the eighth planet was not enough to explain all the discrepancies between the calculated and actual orbit of Uranus. The explanation suggested itself: somewhere in the far reaches of the Solar System, there is another planet that has not yet been discovered. Later, this hypothetical object was designated “Planet X”.
Many researchers tried to find it. One of them was Percival Lowell. He believed that Planet X should be located in the constellation Gemini. Guided by his calculations, in 1930, astronomer Clyde Tombaugh was indeed able to find a celestial body in the area. This object was named Pluto.
By default, Pluto’s mass was believed to be close to Earth’s. However, even with the most powerful telescopes, astronomers could not see the Plutonian disk, but this was explained by the fact that the surface of the new planet is very dark.
But in the 1970s, astronomers finally managed to determine its albedo. It turned out that this body is not dark, but rather unusually bright. And after the largest Plutonian moon, Charon, was discovered in 1978, astronomers were able to measure Pluto’s mass quite accurately. It turned out that it was 500 times less than the mass of the Earth. This meant that the “ninth planet” was not able to influence the movement of Uranus and could not possibly be Planet X. The fact that it was found in the area predicted by Lowell is nothing more than an incredibly lucky coincidence.
The mystery of this influence was solved in the early 1990s, after analyzing data from the Voyager 2 probe. It turned out that Neptune’s mass differs by about 0.5% from the calculated one (the difference is comparable to the mass of Mars). After the corrections were made, all the discrepancies in the orbit of Uranus disappeared, and with them the need for Planet X.
However, modern astronomers do not rule out the possibility that large bodies that have not yet been discovered may indeed exist at the far reaches of the Solar System. In 2016, a lot of noise was made by an article whose authors explained the anomalies in the distribution of the orbits of distant trans-Neptunian objects by the existence of an unknown planet whose mass is several times greater than the Earth’s, and whose orbit passes at a distance of 300-500 AU from the Sun. However, so far, astronomers have not been able to find any traces of this body. Many skeptics believe that the “ninth planet” will eventually share Vulcan’s fate. Moreover, even if this body does exist, it still has nothing to do with Planet X in its traditional sense.
Deadly Nemesis
In 1984, paleontologists suggested that the most significant mass extinctions on Earth occurred over 26 million years. Despite the controversy of the date used and the time interval named by the researchers, several teams of astronomers became seriously interested in this hypothesis and put forward their explanation for the extinction: the presence of a companion to the Sun in the form of an undiscovered white dwarf. This hypothetical star was named Nemesis.
According to the authors of the hypothesis, Nemesis moves in a very elongated orbit. As this star approaches the Sun, it begins to attract comets from the Oort Cloud. Some of them fall into the inner regions of the Solar System and collide with the Earth, causing mass extinctions.
But as telescopes improved, it became clear that there were no hidden white dwarfs near the Sun. Therefore, in the 21st century, the hypothesis was modified by “turning” Nemesis into a brown dwarf. And it’s worth saying that the probability of the existence of relatively close brown dwarfs is not really that small. After all, these objects are not easy to detect. For example, the closest pair of brown dwarfs, Luhman 16, was found only in 2013. It is 6.5 light-years away, which is slightly more than the distance to the more famous Barnard’s star.
However, we can now confidently say that no Nemesis exists. A survey of the celestial sphere by the WISE telescope showed that there are no objects within a radius of at least half a light year from the Sun that are the size of Jupiter or larger. Further analysis of paleodata has refuted both the presence of any obvious periodicity of mass extinctions and the likelihood of a single cause.
Nibiru
In conclusion, let’s talk about Nibiru. Its “author” is the writer Zecharia Sitchin. In 1976, he published the book The Twelfth Planet, in which he stated that his decoding of ancient Sumerian texts “has no analogues” and allowed him to reveal the existence of Nibiru, a planet that makes one revolution around the Sun in 3600 years and is the birthplace of a technologically advanced civilization.
In the future, Sitchin continued to write regularly about Nibiru. And he did so successfully that his books sold millions of copies. So, even though all the author’s statements about this planet were based only on his own words, and the characteristics of its orbit he gave were repeatedly refuted by astronomers as physically impossible, Nibiru quickly became an integral part of the world of ufology and paleocontact fans.
Moreover, most likely, under the influence of the real hypothesis of Nemesis, Nibiru quickly began to assume the functions of an “Earth destroyer”. Thus, it was stated that in 2003 it would collide with our planet. When this did not happen, the “end of the world” was postponed to 2012. And in response to the statements of scientists about the complete absurdity of such a scenario, Nibiru supporters claimed a conspiracy on the part of NASA, which forbade them from talking about the space threat.
When Nibiru failed to destroy the Earth in 2012, it dropped off the news agenda for a while. Recently, however, it has begun to be talked about again, so we may soon see a new Nibiru coming. And this is probably not surprising. After all, it’s no secret that horror stories about the imminent end of the world can be sold as many times as you want. The main thing is to change the dates in time.
This article was published in Universe Space Tech magazine #1 (189) 2023. You can buy this issue in the electronic version in our store.
