Debunking Doomsday
Robert Walker

This is nonsense. Birds have always sung at night. Owls and nightingales obviously. Where I live I often hear those. But ordinary daytime birds too. Robins particularly often sing late at night and very early in the morning and they also sing all the year round, unlike most birds. And when you have street lights, they may sing at any time of the night, kept awake by the street lights.

The story is here Do You Hear Daytime Birds Chirping At Night?

We are not due the next ice age. That is a now disproven theory. Scientists used to think this in the 1970s before we understood the causes of ice ages. It was just based on assuming that this interglacial (warm period between ice ages) would last the same length of time as an average interglacial. The gap between them varies a lot. Now that we understand this better we know that this is a particularly long gap and we won’t go into an ice age for tens of thousands of years into the future.

Here is a video of a robin singing at night near a streetlight.

About robins: Song

Many birds do this.

This is because if you read the Nibiru websites and watch the Nibiru videos you will learn that if you see a bright light, anywhere in the sky, East or West, North or South or directly overhead, or anywhere else, any time of day or night, and you don’t know what it is, that it is a planet Nibiru unknown to astronomers (or hidden by them). If you believe this, and if you aren’t very familiar with the sky, are not an astronomer and don’t know what to look out for, you will get plenty of sightings of “planets”. You will see

  • The light of the sun shining through gaps in clouds on other clouds
  • Lens flares and offset lens reflections. When people say they “saw” Nibiru often they mean they took a photo or a video and saw an unexplained bright spot on it.
  • Helicopters, drones, or sky divers at night with lights on
  • Sky lanterns
  • Sunlight reflecting off the windows of a distant skyscraper
  • The planets Jupiter, Venus, Saturn etc
  • The Moon
  • Many other things you’ve never noticed before because most people rarely do more than occasionally glance at the sky, by day or night.

You’ll see many different bright objects in the sky and if you happen not to recognize one of those you’ll be convinced you’ve seen “Nibiru” and upload a photo or video of it.

You haven’t seen a planet. You’ve just seen a bright light. If they told you that every bright light you don’t recognize is Santa and his sleigh, and you believed them, we’d have loads of reported sightings and uploaded videos and photos of Santa.

See also: Why the idea of Nibiru seems non refutable - and how does astronomy really work?

Debunked: Mystery as huge blue spherical object is captured by NASA cameras (Daily Mail) and Mysterious ‘sphere’ spotted in NASA’s Sun images not so bizarre after all

This is in imagery from NASA’s Stereo A satellite which is currently nearly the other side of the sun from Earth taking photographs of the sun looking in our direction. Dazzathecameraman explains what happened:

So - the camera overheated, and shut down, which then confused the software which superimposed an image from another camera, rotated 90 degrees and possibly flipped, on its video stream output.

Here is the link to the corrupted artifacts page STEREO he mentions in the video.

Advice for journalists - when reporting something like this - these sites have contact details, ask them first before rushing your story to press.

I have links to the faceboook groups he mentions as well as my Doomsday Debunked group on the support page Where can I get support if I’m scared of Nibiru / Doomsday maybe even suicidal?

Summary Earlier this year, astronomers found a dwarf planet in a strange orbit. They called it “Niku”. Conspiracy theorists claim it is Nibiru - this is just another example of them claiming any new astronomical strange discovery as “Nibiru”. It is no threat to Earth.

Details:

Example story to debunk: NASA confirms that planet Nibiru is falling towards Earth

This is the orbit of Niku:

As you see it is a very strange orbit. It’s almost perpendicular to the solar system and actually goes around the sun in the opposite direction to the planets, so “retrograde”. It crosses the ecliptic (the plane of most of the planets) just inside of Neptune’s orbit.

But it never comes anywhere close to Earth.

Find out more: Retrograde Rock "Niku" Defies Orbital Trend - Sky & Telescope

Meet Niku, the Weird Object Beyond Neptune That Nobody Can Figure Out

(471325) 2011 KT19 - Wikipedia

Some of you may enjoy this, it’s a paraody of many of the Nibiru videos, by Dazzathecameraman - shows how easy it is to make a hoax video like this.

I get this often, people say - what if it is real, won’t you all feel so stupid?

Well that’s like someone saying to me “What if it turns out that you have had a cow in your kitchen all your life and you never noticed, how stupid you will feel?”

Yes I would feel very stupid if I suddenly found a cow in my kitchen which had been there all my life, for sure. But it ain’t going to happen :).

And instead, think how stupid you will feel, 20 years from now, if you’ve been scared of Nibiru for twenty years and nothing happened.

It might help to hear this account of someone who used to be very scared of Nibiru, upturned their entire life as a result, and then gradually realized that they had been had by a hoax. An intelligent guy too, a computer programmer, used to logical thinking, he talks about how that logic went out of the window once he got so scared of Nibiru.

See also I understand that Nibiru is not real but still feel scared all the time - what can I do?

And for why astronomers are sure that Nibiru is just nuts, see

Debunked: Nibiru will hit Earth on [Insert Date here]

Star quakes only happen in neutron stars. (Star Quakes (wikipedia)) These are the remnants of super nova explosions and nothing to do with our sun.

Stellar Quakes

However we do get vibrations in our sun. They are like sound waves, though much lower frequency than sound on Earth. Here is some of the sound of the sun speeded up to reach audible frequencies, we don’t actually hear this but they can do videos of the sun and then work out the sound from the movements of its surface:

There is no danger to us from this.

Debunked: NASA is getting ready to Capture Planet X Nibiru on Camera

What they are reporting there is actually an attempt to photograph the so called "Planet 9" - that’s an on going attempt that may take several years to find it, if it exists. They only have a rough idea where to look so need to take many photographs looking for a faint dot that moves between two of the frames.

This is the telescope they will use to search for it. This is just a video about the telescope, not about Planet 9:

The Planet 9 is not Nibiru. If it exists, it's in an orbit that never takes it any closer to Earth than several times the distance to Neptune, and it has to be at the furthest part of its orbit for us to have missed it so far. That's what Mike Brown is talking about.

It is particularly ironic to cite Mike Brown as an astronomer searching for Nibiru. He has written a long article saying that he will answer emails on any topic except Nibiru because it is such nonsense. This is Mike Brown's article about Nibiru: I do not ♥ pseudo-science

And this is my own Debunking Doomsday blog, in a post that explains clearly why planet 9 is not Nibiru. Just look at the diagram for its possible orbit, and judge for yourself: Debunking: Planet 9 is Nibiru

Debunking: Daily Mail online ran a news story with the title"'Doomsday' comet set to shower Earth tonight" saying that conspiracy theorists claim that scientists have miscalculated the orbit for Halley's comet and that it will hit Earth this week.

Orbit of Halley's comet. As you see it can never hit Earth or any other major planet for as long as it remains in this orbit, which is stable over timescales of thousands of years

(longer term it will probably evaporate away as many comets do eventually, over a period of a few thousand years. It's orbit is hard to predict long term exactly because it's orbit is sensitive to small scale perturbations. If it doesn't evaporate, the most likely outcome is that it is ejected from our solar system within 10 million years).

It's true that the Oronids meteor shower is associated with Halley's comet, but it comes from the debris from its tail, blown away from the main comet by the sun. See my answer to Can Halley's comet strike a planet in the solar system?