by Andy Lloyd
This report was written by two British science journalists, Martin Redfern and Nigel Henblest.7 I wrote to Mr. Corliss in the hope of finding out more, but his back catalogue of files was simply too extensive to hunt through in depth. He politely had to decline my request. However, last year my research colleague Greg Jenner kindly sent me a selection of Planet X documents, and among them was the article I had hoped to uncover. It certainly makes for interesting reading.
The article was published in "New Scientist" on 10th November 1983, and discusses the discovery of an object in space whose temperature is 230K, which is too cool for a star, but too warm for a dust cloud. It was spotted by the infrared space telescope in the constellation of Sagittarius, and fit the bill for an object ‘several times heavier than Jupiter’. Remarkably, British scientists at the time accused their American colleagues of keeping the information of this find to themselves. The British scientists publicly questioned why the Americans had "been keeping quiet about it in recent weeks". Speculation was rife, that the discovery was nothing but an intriguing ploy to bolster the chances of further funding from NASA for a new infrared space observatory.7
Those few weeks of silence which followed the report of a new Jupiter-sized planet in the solar system, have now extended to 22 years! Part of the problem might have been that funding ran out before all the observed heat sources could be properly analyzed. Observed objects had been properly catalogued, but there remained an estimated 3 years of further scientific analysis undone. Some might be satisfied with this explanation.
If you’re not feeling quite as charitable as that, you might wonder why this remarkable data was never properly announced to the world. Somehow, it leaked to the British researchers co-working on the project, who discussed the matter openly in the scientific press. They had their own political agenda, it seems, which probably fueled this minor trans-Atlantic spat. But the net result is that we are left with a tantalizing report in New Scientist of the discovery of a Dark Star in our solar system, located in the constellation of Sagittarius.
I suspect this "leak" represented something substantial. Personally, I think they really did find the Dark Star, a planet weighing several Jupiter masses, and that its temperature is indeed 230 Kelvin. Somewhere along the line, its discovery was quietly ditched by the Americans, much to the annoyance of their European counterparts. But given a lack of access to the actual data, the war of words eventually petered out.
Without this article in New Scientist, no one would have known any different. There is usually some fire behind the smoke, after all. But, why would anyone want to shelve such an incredibly important discovery?
The Case for Sagittarius
In his analysis of ancient texts, Zecharia Sitchin offered a number of constellations as probable points along the path trodden by Nibiru. These include, in order, the Great Bear (Ursa Major); Orion (along with the star Sirius); then, Taurus and Aries; before heading towards Sagittarius.8,9,10 The last of these is not listed as a constellation that Nibiru visits, but rather one that it usually disappears from, in its course away from our solar system.
If Sitchin’s textual quotes are to be accepted, then the destination for the fabled planet ― as it disappears once again into the primordial deep ― is Sagittarius. This area just happens to coincide with the location of our reported IRAS object of several Jupiter masses. The Zodiacal constellation of Sagittarius lies on the ecliptic, or the plane of the planets. This would infer, if it truly represents the Dark Star’s aphelion location, that the entire orbit of the rogue planet is not particularly inclined to the others. More on this later.
Suffice it to say for now, that I believe that the extent of the Dark Star’s deviation from the ecliptic is not as great as proposed by Sitchin. I suggest that at perihelion, or the closest point to the sun, that the sighting of ‘Nibiru’ is slightly south of the ecliptic, in the vicinity of Sirius and Orion.
This is supported by the listed constellations from the ancient texts. This is the part of the sky that is known as the ‘Duat’ to the ancient Egyptians. It is a sky location of great importance. But, the Dark Star is not located there at the moment. It is currently very, very far away in the opposite half of the sky, in Sagittarius.
The Busy Archer
Sagittarius is a large constellation, through which runs the path of the planets, or the ecliptic. Sagittarius is not always easily seen by observers in the northern hemisphere, because it is a summer constellation which sits very low in the Southern portion of the sky. This is a pity, because within this constellation lies the heart of our galaxy, the Milky Way, “...studded with clusters and beautiful nebulae and brilliant with dense star clouds”.11 In the centre of these star fields lies the heart of our galaxy, some 30,000 light years away.
This is very important, because the Milky Way is at its brightest in Aquila and Cygnus in the Northern Hemisphere, and Scorpius and Sagittarius in the southern hemisphere. So our search for this distant ‘planet’ will be made all the more difficult by the sheer mass of background stars. Not only that, but there is a huge band of solar system objects, particularly asteroids, all of which reside in a belt around the line of the ecliptic. Searching for more distant objects along this ecliptic will often throw up these solar system objects in the field of view, be they asteroids or short period comets.
Trying to find the distant Dark Star among this array of galactic stars, nebulae and clusters, creates the same difficulties already faced by astronomers looking for other, nearer objects. Sagittarius is just not a great place to hunt for new objects and, frankly, most astronomers avoid searching there because of these difficulties. The plane of the sun’s planets, the ecliptic, and the Milky Way, are like two great circles crossing the sky at angles to one another.
They cross over twice, in Sagittarius, and on the other side of the sky, between Gemini and Taurus. And so, these locations are awkward places to hunt for a faint, practically stationary source of light against the backdrop of millions of others.12 Not only that, but Sagittarius is difficult to observe from the more northern latitudes, anyway. This is a hunt for a needle in a haystack, with the lights turned off.
Because of these problems astronomers like Dave Jewitt and Jane Luu, famous for their discovery of the first trans-Neptunian object, avoid searching for Edgeworth-Kuiper Objects (EKOs) at these nodal regions. Instead, they turn their attention to the much darker constellations, like Pisces.12 As a result, distant solar system objects are almost certainly going to be discovered in the darker constellations, and if the Dark Star just happens to be located in front of the Milky Way galaxy, well, it will probably remain undiscovered. Furthermore, because its motion across the sky is negligible, it will remain in this part of the sky for several generations to come.
John Bagby and the Binary in Sagittarius
A gentleman who has long argued for the existence of a substantial tenth planet is the engineer and amateur astronomer, John Bagby. He wrote several papers outlining evidence he had put forward for the existence of a Massive Solar Companion, or ‘MSC’.13 Bagby was quite sure that such a body existed, and he claimed to have data to prove it, if only someone would listen. He shared this information with astronomers at the US Naval Observatory, including Drs. Harrington and Van Flandern; Dr. Anderson at JPL and Dr. Marsden, who collates sightings of new solar system bodies. He also publicly presented his work at seminars and scientific meetings back in the 1970's.
Bagby produced papers between 1978 and 1980, which went unpublished, that set out his observational data and theoretical underpinning for either a tenth planet, or a massive solar companion. He claimed that the discovery of Pluto in Gemini was located 180 degrees opposite to the massive undiscovered planet, and that the pre-discovery prediction work of Lowell and Pickering could be put down to a classical "direction finding and distance ambiguity".13 In other words, Lowell had been right, but had looked in the wrong direction. Planet X lay in Sagittarius, Bagby claimed.
This proposal from
the late 1970s finds itself in accordance with my own analysis of the location of the Dark Star. Was John Bagby onto something?
Problems emerge for Bagby, when we come to look at his proposals about the size and distance of the binary companion. Basically, Bagby was proposing a full-blown brown dwarf in the Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt.14 We’d be able to see it with a regular telescope. How had he arrived at this fantastic, utterly impossible, conclusion?
It turns out that Bagby was interested in the work of one E.R. Harrison who, in 1977, postulated the existence of a massive nearby body, lying in Sagittarius, required to explain observational anomalies regarding a "pulsar period time derivative".15 This sounds like a bit of a mouthful, doesn’t it? Simply put, pulsars are highly regular emitters of strong radiation. If a gravitational field comes between a pulsar and us, as observers on Earth, then the highly specific data from them pulsar will be altered slightly. This will allow us to imply the existence of a dark gravity field, which is what Harrison proposed in Sagittarius. His finding may thus imply the location of the Dark Star.
Other interesting ideas emerged from the pen of John Bagby. He wondered whether these Massive Solar Companions might have a distributed mass of some description; that a reasonable proportion of the mass of the companion could be found at the LaGrange points of its orbit, presumably in the form of lesser bodies orbiting in a similar pattern to his main candidate object.14 Such an idea might help to explain anomalies encountered by various space-probes that are on their way out of the solar system, namely the two Pioneer spacecraft, which appear to have changed their trajectories over time without a clear causal explanation.16 They seem to be getting dragged back towards the sun. Could this be something to do with an extra quantity of distributed mass in the solar system?
Murray and Sagittarius
So, the location of Sagittarius becomes a more exciting possibility when we look at the evidence of pulsar period time derivatives. The Dark Star may lie within this constellation, at a great distance from the sun, causing the gravitational effects that we have on record as "unexplained anomalies". Is there other evidence pointing towards this constellation as the keeper of our most wonderful secret?
In 1999, a tentative position for a Dark Star was proposed by Dr. John Murray, an academic with the Open University in England with an interest in astronomy. As we noted in the last chapter, his published scientific paper towards the end of 199917 coincided with a similar paper by a group led by Professor John Matese in Louisiana.18 But where John Matese was careful not to indicate where he thought his version of the Dark Star might be located, Dr. Murray opted for a tiny constellation called Delphinus, next to Aquila.17
This location lies in the skies to the north of Sagittarius, within the vast star fields of the Milky Way. John Murray came to his conclusion based upon his treatment of comet trajectory data, assuming that a perturbing influence within the distant outer Oort Cloud of comets was causing them to enter the solar system in a more orderly manner than predicted. He worked backwards from the trail of historical comet passages to pinpoint the location of this Perturber, or Dark Star, which he considered to be several times the mass of Jupiter.
Dr. Murray’s planet lies too far away for my liking, and we should be aware that his work has received some criticism among his own peers.19 Nevertheless, there are some interesting aspects to his conclusions; the Perturber’s size, its inclination to the ecliptic and its position, all find parallels with my own conclusions for the Dark Star, but are based upon very different sets of evidence.
But there is a fundamental difference in agreement about the distance of this object. Murray’s Perturber more closely resembled the proposed ‘Nemesis’ object at the very edge of the sun’s influence, tens of thousands of astronomical units away. Nemesis was the name given to a proto-star thought to be circling the sun some 90,000 AU away, a remarkable distance indeed. It was thought that such an object circled the sun every 27 million years or so, showering our planetary zone with a deadly hail of comets during that interval. This proposal was then neatly presented as an explanation for extinction cycles found on Earth over similar periods of time. Thus, the name ‘Nemesis’.
Compare this to my version of the Dark Star orbiting the sun at 500 astronomical units or more at aphelion, very significantly closer, and smaller! The sub-brown dwarf proposed by Matese and Murray respectively, lies somewhere in the middle of these two more extreme possibilities, at about 20-50,000 AU.
There is no known mechanism to help us understand how a planet could form so far away from a star in the latter case, and many think it unlikely that a 'free-floating' planet might be captured into such an extended orbit. However, if firm data pointed to the existence of such an orbit, the scientific community would quickly figure out a plausible mechanism to explain its presence, I’m sure.
In support of the potential for a small Nemesis-type object, a recent precedent has been discovered by astronomers. In 2002, scientists imaged a young, bright planet in a star-forming region whose distance from the nearest star is over 100,000 astronomical units Called SOri70. The object’s distance from what is possibly its parent star is immense. It should not be so far away, and it is a mystery as to how it got there.20
Is this Jupiter-sized planet orbiting the star, or simply free-floating through the region? It's hard to say right now, but imagine this star was the sun, and the bright planet SOri70 a similar Dark star forming as a distant binary with this sun. This finding sets a precedent for quite an extraordinary orbit, in keeping with Murray's hypothesis.
An Interactive Binary
So, a Dark Star located more than 20,000 times as far away from the sun than the Earth is by no means impossible. It may form in that region in its own right, as part of a dense star-forming cluster inclusive of the sun’s proto-planetary Disk, or it may have been captured later on (though this seems less likely).
There may be a dynamic principle in place as well, whereby such an object is itself perturbed into a close approach to the sun, rather like a comet. There are many gravitational influences outside the solar system which could create such an event, and this scenario would allow us to overlap the existence of a very distant binary object with an observed phenomenon many, many thousands of years ago.21
According to the independent researcher John Lee, a brown dwarf lying in the Oort Cloud at tens of thousands of Astronomical Units could have swept past the solar system after interactions with various external gravitational influences.22 I think this is a viable proposition. The problem with talking about such an idea is that it is a complex scenario, and this puts a lot of people off. But it definitely has its merits, satisfying both the Nemesis and Tenth Planet scenarios simultaneously.
Let me briefly spell out the basics of such an idea: The Dark Star would be in an unstable orbital configuration, easily disturbed by outside influences. Millions of years ago, it was moving along the kind of path advocated by Drs. Murray and Matese. That is, a roughly circular orbit over 20,000 AU away. This caused the initiation of movement of long-period comets to drift down towards the sun. Scientists observe those comets today, recording their movements. Some have wondered whether there are patterns to be found, establishing the existence of a distant planet in the outer Oort Cloud.
There is a cause-and-effect taking place over millions of years; the cause being the disturbance of comets in the outer Oort cloud at the Dawn of Humanity, and the effect being the observation of those same comets by modern-day astronomers.
However, in the meantime, the Dark Star itself is jolted from its orbit towards the sun. It also acts like a comet, and takes on a new, elliptical orbit. This then changes the energy configurations of the planets in the solar system, which we will ponder upon later.
Scientists may then detect the presence of the Dark Star by looking at the affect it has had more recently on the Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt.
In other words, the Dark Star causes two sets of data to emerge, but over different time frames. Its dyn
amic orbit creates a complex picture which seems to indicate two bodies, when there is in reality just one. The constellation Sagittarius thus becomes the location of the ‘jolt’ that sent the Dark Star into its new orbit, and probably shifted a significant set of comets from that part of the sky in so doing. So, it is simultaneously the location of Murray’s sub-brown dwarf, and my Dark Star at aphelion, or the most distant point of its present elliptical orbit.
If the Dark Star had been perturbed into a ‘close’ approach past the solar system millions of years ago - therefore creating the kind of effects recently discovered in the outer solar system ― it may yet be awaiting discovery within the boundaries of the inner Oort Cloud.
The reader will now appreciate the sheer variety of science-based possibilities, to which may be added one or two more.
The Latest Binary Theorists
In the autumn of 2003, an organization called the Binary Research Institute produced a well-written, scientific-style paper that appeared on the Internet. It was accompanied by a professionally produced website complete with eye-catching graphics and charts, and more recently a promotional video. The authors of this well-financed work also favour a Binary system solution, and used it to argue a radical new explanation for the observed Precession of the Equinoxes.
They also speculated about a Dark Companion to the sun located over 1000 AU away, but this time large enough to create a measurable effect upon the sun’s own movement. This is a radical suggestion.23
The problem for Walter Cruttenden and Vince Dayes, who wrote the article, is that their calculated size for the companion body is huge; either a full-blown massive brown or red dwarf, or a normal star. In order to provide the appropriately stretched centre of mass for the solar system, their companion body quickly becomes far too large to have evaded detection. Although, they add in that the highly elliptical nature of the companion’s orbit may mean that it currently resides up to 20 times further away than these average figures suggest.23
