2012, Nibiru, the reversal of the poles? The 20 common questions that NASA people are asked about the claims spread on the Internet * special project

David Morrison, Senior Astronomer at NASA answers questions from which there is great ignorance regarding the most basic astronomical processes * And on top of that, there was no Sumerian god by that name at all, it's an invention of Zechariah Sitchin. Nibiru was a secondary hero in the Babylonian creation epic - over 1,500 years late more

Scientists are tired of pseudo-scientific nonsense that people take too seriously. Some of them decided to take action and collect the most common questions and the answers they sent to the first people asking these questions. The answers given here were compiled by David Morrison, senior astronomer and astrobiologist at NASA.

1. What is the source of the prediction that the world will end in December 2012?

The story began with the claims of Nibiru, a planet that was allegedly discovered by the Guardians and is making its way towards Earth. Zechariah Sitchin, who wrote fictional books about the ancient Mesopotamian Sumerian civilization, claimed in several of his books (for example, The 12th Planet published in 1976) that he discovered translated Sumerian documents identifying the planet Nibiru which orbits the sun once every 3,600 years.
These fictional stories include the stories of ancient astronauts who visited Earth from alien civilizations known as the Anunnaki. Afterwards, self-proclaimed psychic Nancy Leider wrote on the Zetatalk website that the inhabitants of a planet orbiting Zeta Reticuli had warned her that Earth was in danger from Planet X or Nibiru. The disaster was initially predicted for May 2003, but after reading nothing, the doomsday was moved forward to December 2012. Only recently have these two stories been linked to the end of the great calendar of the Mayan culture, on the day of the winter solstice - and therefore also to a more accurate date of December 21, 2012.

2. The Sumerians were the first great civilization and they made accurate scientific predictions, including the existence of the planets Uranus Neptune and Pluto, why not believe their predictions about Nibiru?

Nibiru is a name in Babylonian astrology associated with the god Marduk. Nibiru appears as a secondary character in the Babylonian epic of creation Enuma Elish as recorded in the library of Assyria in the fall of King Assyria (668-627 BC). Fennel flourished a long time before - between the 23rd century BC and the 17th century BC.

The claim that Nibiru is a planet that was known to the Sumerians is contrary to what the scholars (unlike Zechariah Sitchin) who studied and translated the documents of ancient Mesopotamia knew. Shumer was indeed a great civilization, important for the development of agriculture, water management, city life, and especially writing. However, they left very few records in the field of astronomy. Certainly they knew nothing about the existence of Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. They also had no idea that the planets revolved around the sun, an idea first developed in ancient Greece, about two thousand years after the fall of Sumer. The claims that the Sumerians had sophisticated astronomy, or even a god named Nibiru are figments of Sitchin's imagination.

3. How can you deny the existence of Nibiru when NASA discovered it in 1983 and the story appeared in leading newspapers? At that time you called it Planet X and later it was renamed to Xena or Eris?

IRAS - Infrared Sky Scanning Satellite that scanned the sky for 10 months in 1983, discovered many sources of infrared radiation, but none of them is Nibiru or Planet X or any other object at the edge of the Solar System. In short, IRAS cataloged 350 infrared sources, and initially many of the sources were unidentified (which was of course the reason for conducting the survey).
All these observations were continued by other satellites that carried more powerful equipment as well as powerful equipment from the ground. Rumors about the "Tenth Planet" began to break out in 1984 after a scientific article published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters entitled: "Unidentified Point Sources in the IRAS Survey", which discussed several sources that have no equal, but the mysterious objects eventually turned out to be distant galaxies with the exception of one that was Basically a cloud of the material that emits infrared radiation as published in 1987. No IRAS source turned out to be a planet. The bottom line is that Nibiru is a myth without any basis in fact. To an astronomer, claims about a "nearby" but "invisible" planet are completely debunked.

4. Maybe we should have talked about planet X or Eris and not explained why NASA keeps its orbit a secret?

The term "Planet X" is an oxymoron when attached to a real object. The term was used during the 20th century to describe a possible or suspected object. As soon as an object is discovered, it gets a real name, as was done with Pluto and Eris, both of which were sometimes referred to before their discovery as Planet X. If it turns out that a new object that was thought to have been discovered does not exist or is not a planet, you will never hear about it again. If it's real it won't be called planet X.

Eris is one of the dwarf planets discovered by astronomers in the outer solar system. They all have normal orbits that will never bring them close to Earth. Like Pluto, Eris is smaller than our moon, it is distant and its orbit never comes closer than 6 billion kilometers from the sun. There is nothing secret about Eris and its orbit, you are welcome to check it using Google or Wikipedia.

5. Is NASA building a large telescope at the South Pole to monitor Nibiru? What other reason is there to build a telescope at the South Pole?

There is indeed a telescope at the South Pole, but it was not built by NASA and is not used to study Nibiru. The South Pole Telescope is supported by the National Science Foundation and is a radio telescope and not an optical device. It cannot take pictures. You can also read this on Wikipedia. The area of ​​Antarctica It is an excellent place for infrared and short wave astronomy, and this place has the advantage that you can observe objects for many months without the cycle of day and night.

It can also be added that it is difficult to describe a geometry where an object can only be seen from the South Pole, even if it is south of the Earth, it could be seen from the entire Southern Hemisphere and not only from the Pole itself.

6. There are pictures and videos of Nibiru on the Internet. Is this not proof of his existence?

Most of the pictures and videos on the internet show some shapes near the sun (supporting the claim that Nibiru has been hiding behind the sun for the last few years). These images are fake images of the sun created as a result of internal reflections in the lens, a phenomenon known as "lens flare". This can be easily identified by the fact that they appear in the exact opposite place of the actual image of the sun, as it is reflected in the center of the image. This is especially true for video clips when the camera moves, the false image bounces almost exactly in the opposite direction to the real image.

Many lens flares are the source of UFO images taken at night when there are strong light sources such as street lights in the frame. I'm amazed that people don't recognize this common phenomenon. I'm also amazed that these images showing something as large and bright as the sun (a second sun) are taken at the same Ether along with the claims that Nibiru is too pale to show and photograph, except in large telescopes.

A common telescopic image shows two possible views of a propagating gas cloud that is far outside the solar system and is not moving. You can see that the stars are the same in both pictures. A sharp-eyed reader of the site identified these two images as the gas shell around the star V838 Mon. Wikipedia has an article and a beautiful picture of the star taken by the Hubble telescope. A high school student who was impressed by a picture of a red ball that was said to be Nibiru. He then worked in Photoshop in his class and discovered how to create such images from scratch.

A video posted in the summer of 2008 on YouTube www.youtube.com/watch?v=qDKtkWIx00A shows a guy standing in his kitchen and claims that one of the objects discovered by NASA's X-ray telescope is Nibiru. What is his proof? That since the image released by NASA is colored blue Artificially to highlight the object, the imaged object must be a planet with an ocean. It would be funny if it wasn't used to scare people.

7. How do you explain the fact that the area (5h 53m 27s, -6 10' 58”) is not covered by both Google Sky and Microsoft-Telecom? People are claiming that the place is censored because those are the coordinates where Nibiru is at the moment?

Several people asked him about the empty rectangle in the Orion group on Google Sky, which shows images from the SLOAN sky scanner. This cannot be Nibiru's hiding place because it is an area that can be seen from anywhere on Earth in the winter of 2007-8 when the talk about Nibiru began. This contradicts the claims that Nibiru hides behind the sun or that it can only be seen from the southern hemisphere. I was also curious about this empty rectangle, so I asked a friend who is a senior scientist at Google. He returned because he discovered that data for this area was missing due to a processing error in the image stitching software that Google uses to display the Sloan Sky Survey. The team assured me that in the next run it would be fixed.

8. If the government knew about Nibiru, is it keeping it a secret to avoid panic? Isn't it the government's job to keep the population calm?

There are many purposes for government, but they do not include keeping the population calm. Experience shows that sometimes parts of the government do exactly the opposite, such as warnings about terrorist threats or warnings about accidents on long holiday weekends that are no more dangerous than at other times. Social science experts have proven that the perception of public panic is a product of Hollywood, while in the real world people have a good background in helping each other in times of danger. I think everyone will recognize that keeping bad news a secret usually backfires, and makes the problem more difficult when the facts come out. In the case of Nibiru, the facts will come out quite soon (2012).

Even if we wanted to, the government could not keep Nibiru's existence a secret. If he was real, he would be followed by thousands of amateur and professional astronomers. These astronomers are scattered all over the world. Knowing the astronomical community, these scientists cannot keep a secret even if ordered to. A planet on its way to the inner solar system cannot be hidden.

9. Why does the Mayan calendar state that the world will end in 2012? I have heard they have been quite accurate in the past in predicting other planetary phenomena, how can you at NASA be sure you know more than they did?

Calendars exist to track the passage of time, not to predict the future. The Mayan astronomers were clever and they developed a very complex table. Ancient calendars are of interest to historians but lack the ability we have today to track time, or be as accurate as the calendars we use today. The main point is that the boards, new or ancient cannot predict the future of the planet or warn us about the things that will happen on a certain date such as 2012.
As after December 31st the end of the world does not come, but a new year simply begins.

10. And what about the pole exchange theory? Will the earth's crust be able to make a revolution around the core in days if not hours? Does this have anything to do with the deepening of the solar system below the galactic plane?

A reversal in the Earth's rotation is impossible. It never happened and never will happen. There is a slow movement of the continents (for example Antarctica was found near the equator hundreds of millions of years ago) but this is not relevant to the claim of reversing the direction of rotation of the poles. However, many of the websites dealing with the disaster are misleading. They claim a connection between the self-rotation and the magnetism at the Earth's poles, which do change. This phenomenon of the reversal of the poles occurs once every 400 thousand years on average. As far as we know, this phenomenon is not harmful to life on Earth.
The reversal of the magnets is not expected to happen in the next few thousand years anyway. However, the followers of catastrophes claim that the reversal is expected to happen very soon - 2012, but this is not the same phenomenon they call - a reversal of the rotation of the poles.

A. There is no connection between the direction of rotation and the magnetism of the poles
B. There is no reason to expect a reversal of the magnetic poles in the foreseeable future, or to expect any negative effects if it does eventually occur.
third. A sudden change in the direction of rotation of the poles with disastrous consequences is impossible.
Also, none of this has anything to do with crossing the galactic plane or other alignment nonsense that appears on conspiracy theory sites.

11. When most of the planets will align in 2012 and the Earth will be in the center of the Milky Way, what will be the effect on us on Earth? Can this cause the poles to change and if so, what should be expected?

No alignment of planets is expected in 2012 or at any time in the coming decades. As for the earth at the center of the galaxy? I did not understand the meaning of the sentence. If you mean the Milky Way galaxy, we are far from the center and closer to the end of the spiral arm, about 30 thousand light years from its center. We orbit the center of the galaxy once every 225-250 million years, always maintaining the same distance.

As for the reversal of the poles, we have already mentioned that changing the direction of the Earth's rotation is not possible, indeed, many websites refer to the alignment of the Earth and the Sun with the center of the Milky Way in the group of Sagittarius. This happens every December, and it has no effects, and therefore there is no reason to expect that 2012 will be any different from any other year.

12. When the Sun and the Earth cross the galactic plane at the same time as the black hole at the center of the galaxy, couldn't that cause something, due to the fact that the black hole has such a strong gravitational pull?

There is a black hole at the center of the Milky Way, and like any concentration of mass it creates gravitational forces on the rest of the galaxy. However, the center of the galaxy is very far away, about 30 thousand light years, so its influence on the solar system and the Earth is negligible. There are no special forces affecting the Earth either in the center of the galaxy or in the plane of the galaxy. The only important force that plays a role on Earth is the gravitational pull of the Sun and the Moon. As for the effect of the plane of the galaxy, there is nothing special about this location. The last time Earth was in the galactic plane was several million years ago. The claims that we are about to cross the galactic plane are not true.

13. I am afraid that the earth will enter a black crack for the milk, what will this cause? Will the earth be swallowed up?

"Black Rift" is a popular name for large dust clouds scattered in the inner arms of the Milky Way, blocking us from seeing the center of the galaxy. The whole fear of a galactic alignment is crazy. At the end of December the Sun is always in the direction of the center of the galaxy as seen from Earth, so what? The scare sites' use of "professional" words such as alignment, dark crack, photon belt and more should not be given importance precisely because they are not understood by the general public. This thing is bad, but there is no law against lying on the Internet or anywhere else except in court. As far as the safety of the planet is concerned, the important threat is from global warming and the loss of biological diversity, and a collision with a comet or an asteroid is possible one day, and not from pseudo-scientific claims about 2012.

14. I heard that the Earth's magnetic field will reverse in 2012 when the biggest solar storm in history hits us. Will this phenomenon cause the destruction of our culture?

Towards the peak in the solar cycle, which occurs approximately once every 11 years, strong solar storms erupt in greater numbers than during the solar minimum. Flames and massive emissions do not cause harm to humans or other living creatures on Earth. with may endanger astronauts in deep space or on the moon and this is on NASA's agenda for investigation before returning to the moon. Strong eruptions interfere with radio transmissions, create the aurora borealis and may damage the electronic components in satellites traveling in space. Today many satellites are designed to deal with the phenomenon , mainly by turning off some of the delicate devices to a safe state for several hours. In extreme cases of solar activity, it can disrupt the transmission the electricity on the ground, and cause power outages, but this is rare.

The last solar maximum occurred in 2001, and the next one is indeed expected to be 11 years later - around 2012. However, the last solar minimum was unusual, with a period of about two years with almost no sunspots at all, nor any other signs of solar activity, so scientists can guess that the maximum The next one will be postponed, maybe to 2013. However, the details of the solar cycle are still unpredictable.

You are correct that the Earth's magnetic field protects us by creating a region in space known as the Earth's magnetosphere, within which most of the material emitted by the Sun is repelled or trapped, but there is no reason to expect the magnetic field to reverse in the near future. Magnetic reversals occur on average once every 400 thousand years.

15. I am confused by the report on the Fox News network website that in 2012 a strong solar storm could paralyze the US for months. They are relying on research funded by NASA. If nothing is going to happen as a result of such an event in 2012 why would NASA allow such nonsense to be published in its name?

NASA is pleased with the National Science Council's report on the physics of the Sun. This report includes an analysis of the worst case scenario that could occur today if the strongest recorded solar storm - which occurred in 1859 - returns. The problem is that such information can be misused if taken out of context. A reason to expect such a large storm to occur in the near future, especially not in 2012. There is no forecast for a 2012 event in the report either, we don't know if The solar maximum will occur in the same year. All the disaster scenarios of 2012 are a scam, fueled by the Hollywood action movie 2012. I can only hope that most people know the difference between a Hollywood scenario and reality.

16. And what about a meteor strike?

The earth has always been a target of impact by comets and meteors, but the encounter with the largest ones is rare. The last major impact occurred 65 million years ago and led to the extinction of the dinosaurs. Today, NASA astronomers are conducting a survey known as the Space Watch Survey to find near-Earth asteroids that endanger us long before they hit. We have also been able to determine that there are no asteroids the size of the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. This work is done in an open manner and observations are uploaded every day to NASA's NEO website , so that everyone can see for themselves that there is no forecast for damage in 2012.

17. If it's all a hoax why doesn't NASA issue an official denial? How can stories like this go around and scare people? Why doesn't the government do something?

The answer is that NASA has put out tons of material explaining that any Nibiru or end of the world in 2012 issue is a hoax. Try searching nasa.gov for key words like NIBIRU or 2012. There isn't much else NASA can do. These scams have nothing to do with NASA and are not based on NASA data. Scientists, inside and outside of NASA, have mentioned that this is a hoax designed to scare people and divert attention from important scientific issues such as global warming and biodiversity loss. We live in a country where there is freedom of speech and that includes the freedom to lie. You should be happy that there is no censorship. But it would be good if you use your common sense and be able to spot the lies as we approach the year 2012. The lies will be even easier to detect.

18. Similar question, can you prove Nibiru is a scam, I need proof because the government and NASA are hiding a lot of things from us.

It makes no sense to look for evidence that the 2012 doomsday theory is a hoax. You should direct the question to those who spread the theory that they will prove that what they say is true and not for NASA to prove that they are lying. If someone claims on the Internet that a purple elephant 20 meters high passed through Cleveland, would anyone expect NASA to prove that this is not the case? The burden of proof falls on those making the claim. Remember the words of the late Carl Sagan that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence if they are to be believed.

However, astronomers have reached the point where they can provide conclusive evidence that Nibiru does not exist. A large planet or brown dwarf in our solar system should have been known to astronomers for years, both indirectly as a result of the gravitational perturbations on other objects and by direct infrared observation. NASA's IRAS infrared telescope did an all-sky survey in 1983 and several satellites that followed would have seen Nibiru if it had been there. Moreover, if a large mass crossed the inner solar system once every 3,600 years we would see perturbations in the orbits of The inner planets and we don't see it.

Besides that, there were sites that said we could see Nibiru with the naked eye in the spring of 2009. Half a year has passed since then, has any astronomer also seen it through a telescope? Have such photos been published in respected professional magazines such as Sky and Telescope? No one could hide Nibiru if it existed.

19. What about the scare ads for the new movie about 2012? They ask us to go to the sites and verify the threat.

The pseudo-scientific claims about Nibiru and doomsday in 2012, along with the lack of trust in the government, were amplified by the PR for a Columbia Pictures film entitled 2012, which was released in November 2009.

The film's trailer showed a tidal wave crashing over the Himalayas, with the following words in the background: "How can the governments of the earth prepare 6 billion people for the end of the world? A short pause and then "They can't. Again a long wait - search for the truth, search on Google 2012.

The film's public relations created Fake science site For the "Institute for the Continuity of the Human Race" which is entirely fictional. According to the website, the IGC is for scientific research and public preparation. His mission is the survival of the human race. The website explains that the institute was founded in 1978 by leaders and governments from all over the world, businessmen and scientists. They say that in 2004 the IHC confirmed with 94% certainty that the world will be destroyed in 2012. This site encourages humans to sign up for a lottery to choose those who will be saved. My colleague registered her cat and she was accepted. Wikipedia states that creating fake websites is a new advertising technique known as viral marketing, by analogy with computer viruses.

20. Is the flood of responses part of some kind of campaign for a book or movie, in the hope that a large mass of deniers will accept this as evidence that it is a conspiracy theory?

I ask myself every day as the volume of words I receive about Nibiru, the galactic alignment and the pole reversal continues to grow - now over 20 a week. It is clear that money can be made from people's fear of the impending doomsday. Some of the hype was created because of the movie. Many sites sell books and CDs about Nibiru and even survival kits. It's very bad. There are so many real concerns (and I will add that many of the conspiracists who claim that the earth will be destroyed in 2012 also claim that there is no global warming).

In the final chapter of the new astronomy book "The Race for Planet X" by Gobert Schilling he writes: "The revealers of the truth have a lot of work to do - the archaeologists and astronomers who look skeptically at the tidal waves of Nibiru nonsense and explain with scientific precision what is wrong with these cosmic children's fairy tales. They will have to devote For this, at the expense of their real work in the coming years, in December 2012, a pseudo-story will blossom New science and the whole circus will begin again. Because no matter how the celestial bodies are found in the solar system, there will always be a need for a mysterious planet X."

So much for David Morrison's words. Send the link to this page to anyone from whom you have heard sympathy for the strange arguments about 2012, which indicate a fear of science, ignorance and an abysmal hatred for everything that smells like government. Governments are often wrong (for example the drought tax, and maybe even the biometric database) but governments are also sometimes right.

To the article on the NASA website

For further reading on the subject on the science website:

• The end of the world will not come in 2012
• 2012: No Planet X or Nibiru heading our way
• No comet threatens us. And is Google hiding the threat?
• 2012: Beware of websites pretending to be scientific to promote the movie of that name