14 DAY TRIAL // According to the conclusions of the latest scientific study on the issue, there is no Death Star-type celestial object skimming the outskirts of our solar system, ready to annihilate our planet in 2012.
There are currently no documented instances in which a research was able to identify any type of discernible threat of this magnitude. Those who argue that the planet is real, and that it is capable fo hurtling asteroids to the inner solar system have absolutely no proof of this.
While it is true that some researchers did propose the existence of such a star, called Nemesis, people who argue that the world is about to end fail to take into account the reasons for this proposals.
When it first appeared, the idea that Nemesis is real was put together in order to explain what experts referred to as the periodicity of mass extinctions on Earth. In other words, after analyzing the intervals at which the five known great extinction events took place, these scientists thought they saw a pattern.
However, not even to this day was anyone ever capable of producing the slightest shred of evidence that Nemesis is orbiting in the Oort Cloud of comets, many astronomical units (AU) away from the Sun. An AU is the mean distance between the Sun and Earth, about 93 million miles.
The thinking among Nemesis proponents is that the object is orbiting very far away from the Sun, but is somehow sufficiently large to nudge comets off-course. The object is believed to be responsible for the comets that are periodically sent to the inner solar system from the clouds.
The new study indicates that the patterns these individuals refer to are simple statistical artifacts, rather than a solid link. “There is a tendency for people to find patterns in nature that do not exist,” explains Coryn Bailer-Jones, the researcher who authored the new research.
“Unfortunately, in certain situations traditional statistics plays to that particular weakness, the expert says in a statement quoted by Space. He holds an appointment at the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heidelberg, Germany.
Bailer-Jones used a statistical tool known as Bayesian analysis to study the rate at which mass extinction events occurred over the past 250 million years, but was unable to discover any type of pattern that may indicate the existence of Nemesis.
Just like the conspiracy theory-proposed planet Nibiru, Nemesis appears to be the figment of people's imagination. If any of these two objects really existed – which is an astronomical impossibility – then they would have been detected long ago.
“From the crater record, there is no evidence for Nemesis. What remains is the intriguing question of whether or not impacts have become ever more frequent over the past 250 million years,” Bailor-Jones concludes.