Planet Nine
In the cold dark outer-reaches of the solar system is a hypothetical giant object known variously as planet nine, planet x, giant planet five, Jehoshaphat, Fatty and, in the paranoid apocalypse-meme-world of the internet, it is the killer planet Nibiru, scheduled to collide with earth in late 2012, respectively. This planet is an object of pure mathematical conjecture and is, as of yet, unseen. Planet nine would have a mass 10x that of the earth and whose highly elongated transit would take anywhere from 10,000 to 20,000 years to orbit the sun. Astrophysicists speculate such a planet due to the clustering behavior of smaller new-found dwarf planets orbiting in the inner Kuiper Belt, a particularly crowded region of the Oort Cloud, that outermost debris-filled rim of the solar gravitational well. The clustering of these smaller objects infers a larger one. Astronomers Batygin and Brown “demonstrate that the perihelion positions and orbital planes of the objects are tightly confined and that such a clustering has only a probability of 0.007% to be due to chance, thus requiring a dynamical origin.” This dynamical origin is the revenant planet nine; the “distant eccentric perturber.” Is this not a fair illustration of the unconscious? Of the zonked theory here at spacewhy, perhaps no speculation is more out-there (made of pure rhetorical conjecture) than that the true identity of planet nine is, in fact, none other than the unknowable planet earth itself. The collision of such a planet with our world would make a sci-fi example of the return of the repressed…
See also:
The Oort Cloud
