Many of the Nibiru website authors claim to be very knowledgeable about astronomy. It is easy to test though, and find out that they don't understand this stuff. Here are some things they may say which immediately show they are mistaken, don’t have the most basic understanding of astronomy, and don't check their sources.

• If they say IRAS found a planet in 1983 - they are wrong - just follow the links that the debunkers give and you can confirm for yourself that IRAS did not find any planets
• If they say Robert Harrington found planet X and was silenced - they are wrong - his theory was proven to be false six months before he died by Myles Standish
• If they say a planet can hide behind or near the sun for years on end then suddenly appear, they are wrong
• If they say that the Earth's geographical poles have shifted, easy to show they are wrong by checking any starry night, couple of observations and you see that our pole star is still due North. (Magnetic poles do swap places every few tens of thousands of years but there is no sign of that at present and it would not cause earthquakes if they did)
• If they publish a lens flare or an offset lens reflection or sunlight lighting up a patch on clouds, and claim it is Nibiru this shows they are very gullible and don’t understand the basics of astronomy.
• If they post a distant object in Google sky, such as a planetary nebula, hundreds, or thousands of light years away and claim it is Nibiru they are wrong
• If they claim we have two suns, easy to check, just block out our sun with one finger, and you can see they are wrong

This rather dramatic image has gone the rounds a bit and been posted as a photograph of a double sunset in China. It's actually an artist's impression from NASA of a double sunset over an alien planet.

If someone tells you that we have two suns - then you know they are speaking BS. Click away as that means they don’t have the first clue about astronomy.

It is dead easy to check that we have only one sun. Hold a finger in front of it (don’t stare at the Sun as you won’t know if your eyes get damaged) With the sun blocked, do you see a second sun to either side, or above or below? No! Therefore we have only one sun. It really is as easy as that to debunk this one.

• If they say that the astronomers' Planet X or Tyche or Nemesis are Nibiru, they are wrong as all the astronomer's hypothetical planets are hypotheses for planets that orbit permanently way beyond Neptune - if they exist they are no more of a danger to Earth than Neptune or Jupiter.
• If they say that the Nemesis theory predicts end of Earth in the near future they are wrong - the theory (which is more or less disproved now) predicted a possibility of mass extinctions at various dates around 15 million years into the future.
• If they say that Nibiru is in a 3600 year orbit that goes from outside Pluto to Earth, that's an orbit that is not stable for as long as a million years so they are wrong
• If they say that “Planet 9” is Nibiru, then they are wrong as it always orbits well beyond Neptune, if it exists at all.
• If they say a brown dwarf is invisible they are wrong - a brown dwarf is no more invisible than you or me (we also are infrared sources as we are quite warm).

If anyone says any of these things and claims to be an expert in astronomy - that’s like someone telling you that Usain Bolt is a top seeded tennis player and won Wimbledeon and then claiming to be an expert on sport.

That wouldn’t lead you to suddenly wonder if he really is a tennis player and wonder if all the Olympic finals were faked to make him out to be a sprinter. You’d just look at the person who said this askance, or indeed aghast, and then from then on you’d probably never trust anything they say on matters of sport.

Usain Bolt winning the 100 meters in Bejing in 2008. If someone told you he was a top seeded tennis player - that would just lead you to treat that person as someone who doesn’t know what they are talking about in matters of sport.

So - it’s like that if you have even a basic understanding of astronomy and someone says any of those things I listed, or posts them on a website, or a youtube video, you immediately know that this person knows nothing at all about astronomy. They know as much about astronomy as the person who said that Usain Bolt was a tennis player knows about sport.

There are many other things they say that are immediate giveaways that they don't have the first clue about astronomy. Indeed if an article claims to be astronomical and uses the words Nibiru or Hercobulus or Wormwood, then unless it is a debunking site, that is a giveaway sign that the author knows nothing of modern astronomy. But what I've listed there already deals with 99% of them probably. That is except for the ones that have no astronomy and just base their prophecies on miracles and the Bible or such like.

If anyone says any of those things, they don't understand astronomy, just click away. See also my Debunking: You can’t trust anyone except the Nibiru people - everyone else is a paid shill of the government or in some other way motivated to propogate falsehoods

WHY ASTRONOMERS KNOW FOR SURE THAT NIBIRU IS NUTS (IF THEY HAVE HEARD OF IT AT ALL)

Nibiru is just an internet myth / hoax. There is no genuine astronomy behind it. They quote lots of astronomical news stories but they misunderstand them.

The idea of a planet in a 3600 year orbit or a 360 year orbit that crosses the paths of all the gas giants is an astronomical nonsense, BS.

Here are some of the absurdities

• The orbit is not stable. A planet that crosses the path of all four gas giants, Jupiter, Saturn Uranus and Neptune could not stay in that orbit for more than about a million years. Our solar system is more than four billion years old. So it is an impossible orbit for a planet in our solar system though it was possible for a few million years when the sun and solar system first formed.
  
  A planet in such an orbit would be ejected from the solar system, or hit the sun or another planet, or be torn to pieces by the sun or Jupiter, or evaporate in the heat of the sun within a million years. Or if it was a big planet like a brown dwarf, it would do the same to our planets, destroy many of them, put the others into elliptical orbits and generally make the planet uninhabitable. This would have happened already over four billion years ago, not today. It would essentially be a binary system and binary systems with the smaller brown dwarf in an orbit like that don't have stable planets in orbits like ours.
  
  Astronomers do search for planets way beyond Neptune. Those can be in stable orbits in our solar system because most of the ideas for planets are in orbits that never get s close to us as the very distant Neptune. Pluto does cross Neptune's orbit - that's possible because it is in a resonance with Neptune. It's not possible though to be in a resonance with both Neptune and Uranus, never mind all four of the gas giants.
• Brown dwarfs are not invisible - many of the Nibiru enthusiasts say that it is a brown dwarf and as such can’t be seen. A brown dwarf is no more invisible than you or me. Indeed a brown dwarf is easier to spot than a large planet like Jupiter. A brown dwarf is a planet that is so large that it begins to start fusion reactions, but not quite large enough to turn into a star. As a result it is hotter than most planets, and so can be seen in infrared. It does not emit any visible light, unlike ka star. A brown dwarf in the depths of interstellar space is invisible in the same way that you are invisible in a dark room with no lights on. If it comes anywhere near to a star then it is viable by the light of the star just as you are. A brown dwarf at the distance of Jupiter would be at least as bright as Betelgeuse even if it was the coldest darkest brown dwarf known.
• There can’t be that much unknown matter inside of Saturn’s orbit, no matter what it is made of. We have a much better model of the solar system now than we had even ten or twenty years ago, because of all the interplanetary spacecraft that we have launched. We can track their paths with extreme precision. Our measurements are so precise that if there was an asteroid as large as a seventh of the size of Ceres, which in turn is 1/78 of the size of our Moon, we'd discover it by its gravitational effects on our spacecraft if it is anywhere between Saturn and the sun. We'd notice the effects of anything else like that, gas cloud or whatever if it had that much mass.
• We have huge sensitive telescopes scanning the night sky for asteroids every single night. They can spot an object as small as 300 meters in diameter at the distance of the outer edge of the asteroid belt. We find objects as small as 10 km across way out beyond Jupiter, and 100 km across way out beyond the very distant Neptune. These telescopes have already found every single asteroid of 10 kilometers upwards that does flybys of Earth in short period orbits of a few years. That leaves comets. PAN STARRS can find a 1 km comet a year before it gets ot Earth and a 6 km diameter comet 3 years before it gets here.
  
  There is no way these telescopes can miss an extra planet in our solar system.
  
  The idea is as absurd as someone discovering a cow living in your kitchen that's been there for years and you never noticed it.

MORE ABOUT WHY NIBIRU’S ORBIT IS UNSTABLE

The Nibiru orbit is unstable and would not last as long as a million years in our solar system because it crosses the paths of four gas giants Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune all with different orbital periods. It's like rope skipping

Missing a planet on every orbit is like jumping a rope. You can do it if there is only one planet to miss each time. Pluto does that with Neptune, it goes inside Neptune's orbit every time it is closest to the sun, but that's no problem because it is in a resonance with Neptune and just like someone rope skipping - whenever they land on the ground the rope is not there so they don't get tangled up in it. Similarly every time Pluto gets closest to the sun, Neptune is not there and is elsewhere in its orbit so no problem.

But now imagine you have to skip four ropes simultaneously, you have to jump in a regular fashion (because orbits repeat exactly) and those four ropes are being turned at four different speeds with no resonances between them. That would be impossible. Similarly it is impossible for Nibiru to keep missing all four gas giants on every orbit for long. It can't keep that up for as long as a million years. Our solar system is over 4 billion years old. So such an orbit is impossible.

PLANETS BEYOND NEPTUNE

Astronomers do often hypothesize planets that orbit beyond Neptune. They call all these planets “planet X” where the X there doesn’t stand for 10, it stands for unknown, X as in unknown quantity. Pluto was called planet X before they discovered it,

So, if you see a story about “planet X” then it means they don’t know if it exists or not. It’s just a hypothesis.

The Nibiru people seem to think that all these hypothetical planets are real planets.

Then they also ignore all the parameters in the hypothesis. Scientists publish a paper saying there might be a brown dwarf that orbits 1.5 light years away from Earth. (That’s the idea of Nemesis, which is now pretty much disproved after the Wise infrared survey didn’t find it, and would have found a brown dwarf unless it was unusually cold).

The Nibiru people then skim read this paper and conclude that it proves that there is a planet called Nibiru in a 3600 year orbit that comes into the inner solar system and is already in the inner solar system and about to fly past Earth or hit it a few months into the future or a few weeks into the future.

They don’t seem to see the discrepancies between what the scientists say and what they are saying.

• The astronomers are looking for planets that always orbit beyond Neptune. These are possible. A planet that comes inside of Neptune’s orbit but doesn’t cross Uranus’s orbit is also possible.
• The Nibiru people claim that a planet can be in an orbit that crosses the orbits of all four gas giants. We would see such a planet easily for decades on its way in and the orbit is unstable. This is impossible.
• Therefore the planets the astronomers are searching for are not Nibiru. if by Nibiru you mean this idea of a planet that can fly past Earth or hit Earth.

They behave like script writers for a movie.

If you make a movie, your ideas don’t have to make scientific sense, they just have to seem plausible enough for most of the audience to be able to suspend disbelief. Even scientists can enjoy movies like that, I like Star Trek and Doctor Who though much of what they say just makes no scientific sense at all.#

REAL LIFE IS NOT A MOVIE SCRIPT

But it doesn’t work in real life. In real life and astronomy the ideas have to make sense and the Nibiru ones don’t.

BIZARRE INCONSISTENT IDEAS

They say really bizarre things. They think that a planet in a 3600 year orbit can stay behind the sun all the way through its orbit. The sun goes through twelve constellations every year. Jupiter goes through one of the zodiacal constellations each year. A planet in a 3600 year orbit would go through them even more slowly. From that it’s easy to see that it’s impossible for a planet in a long period orbit to “hide behind the sun”. But they don’t seem to be able to understand this.

They believe, many of them, that the Earth’s poles have shifited. You just need to go out any starry night, locate the pole star, go out an hour or two later and check that it is the only star that hasn’t shifted and you debunk that idea with your own eyes. Due North still points towards the pole star. They can’t see this.

They also believe we have two suns and that this second sun appears in photographs take in a cell phone camera. It is so easy to debunk this. that just about anyone will just LOL if you say we have two suns, except the Nibiru people.

On any sunny day block out the sun with your finger. Do you see a second sun? (Don’t stare at the sun itself as your eyes can be damaged and you feel no pain as you have no pain receptors in your retina and effects can happen much later like hours later you start to lose your sight)

I find it incredible that anyone even gives this a moment of thought, whether or not we have one sun or two.

IT’S LIKE PROPOGANDA

But I’ve come to understand how it works I think. It’s like propoganda. If you watch lots of videos and read lots of stories then you come to believe it through repetition, if the videos and stories seem impressive to you. Much as people come to beleive in propoganda. Also a bit like the way advertising works.

For this to happen you have to have no understanding of physics or astronomy, but there are many people who flunked physics at school, and indeed why should everyone understand physics :). I’m not good at languages and have no idea about how baseball or american soccer works.

RESPONSIBILITY OF JOURNALISTS

So I think that youtube videos and newspaper reporters are part of what leads people to get so scared about things that if they could relate to their own common sense, they would see are nonsense.

I’ve done a couple of petitions on Change.org

Youtube: Petition to Youtube to Halt Ads on Doomsday Videos

Petition: Let's End Dramatized Reporting Of "Doomsday" Stories - The Vulnerable Get Suicidal

Do sign and share, it may help.

OBJECTS THAT CAN HIT EARTH

As for other objects that could hit Earth, well we have a survey of all the NEOs of 10 kilometers upwards and know their orbits well, and none of them can hit Earth before 2100. We could be hit by a comet but that’s now a 1 in 100 million probability, can be 99.999999% sure it won’t happen this century, and we’d be able to track it for at least a year and probably much longer on its way in if it was a large comet like that.

It is possible for a 1 kilometer object to hit Earth with only a few weeks of warning as though we know 90% of those, that leaves 10% of them still to find. We will have 99% by the late 2020s and are finding one of them every month at present.

An object that large is large enough to cause a tsunami, or to have serious effects on land, and put enough dust into the atmosphere to have some global effects. If we found such an object headed our way we’d need to evacuate the impact zone and couldn’t do much to deflect it at such late notice.

But this is very very unlikely. After all it has never happened in recorded human history and is no more likely to happen in this century than any other. Indeed is less likely because we have found 90% and they are not headed our way so the known probability of it happening is a tenth of what it was before we found those 90% of them. So we can be more confident that it won’t happen than anyone in any previous century already. By the 2020s we will be a hundred times more confident than we could be e.g. last century. Unless we find one headed our way of course, in which case it’s most likely to do several flybys first so we can deflect it, easy to do if it has a flyby of Earth.

Can’t say it is impossible but it’s very unlikely, and ordinary things like traffic accidents or health issues are far more significant. Even being killed by lightning or a tornado is more likely than being killed by an asteroid.

But we can do something about it. For half a billion dollars we can build a space telescope to do an infrared survey from inside of Earth’s orbit close to Venus to find most of the objects down to 20 meters within a decade.

Sentinel telescope developed by the B612 foundation. They have not yet managed to find enough funds to complete it although they did raise many millions of dollars. They were going to partner with NASA but they pulled out due to lack of funding. Any major technological country world-wide could fund this and hardly notice the effect on their defence budget.

It would sit inside of Earth close to Venus's orbit giving it a good field of view of NEOs close to the sun. It looks away from the sun to avoid being blinded by it - and it can then see faint NEOs that are in between the Earth and the Sun which is the hardest place to spot them from our current Earth based surveys. It would help fix that blind spot for asteroids that come from the direction of the sun. It looks in infra red because the asteroids are far more obvious in the infrared.

Eventually it would spot just about everything out there that's in the vicinity of the Earth orbit.

Idea is that it would find nearly all potential impactors down to 20 meters diameter.

If we find anything headed our way then with a decade or two of warning it would be easy to deflect.

It doesn’t make much sense to build an asteroid defense system based on expensive rockets that might not be needed for a hundred million years into the future (for the 10 km asteroids) or thousands of years inot the future for the smaller ones.

So unless we had huge amounts of funding ,the first priority is to do surveys and detect them. If we find something headed our way we can then build the defences against them, and if we do a complete survey we would expect decades of warning and can deflect them easily. So the priority right now is funding to detect them. We are doing quite well there. But for a tiny fraction, of say, the amount the UK government just voted to spend on renewing the Triden tnuclear weapons, an amount so small the defence budget of any major country would hardly notice it, we could find nearly all the asteroids down to 20 meters in diameter within a decade.

I think an ET would find it astonishing that we spend so much on defending ourselves against each other, yet none of the advanced countries in the entire world can find half a billion dollars for a space telescope to find the NEOs that threaten us from space.

For more on that, see Giant Asteroid Headed Your Way? - How We Can Detect And Deflect Them

My Nibiru debunking articles are here

• Simple Ways To See Nibiru Is Totally Nuts - And Limits On Planets Hiding In Our Solar System
• Why An Extra Planet Can't Be Hidden Behind The Sun Or Above The South Pole
• "Imaginary Bullshit Planet" Nibiru - Lens Flares, Sun Mirages, Hoaxes & Just Plain Silly
• Why This New "Planet X" Is No Threat To Earth :).
• No, There Isn't A Planet Called Nibiru, Soon To Hit Earth, And Often Visible In Your Photos Of The Sun :)
• Kudos To "The Independent" Newspaper For Debunking Nibiru "Blood Moon" Hoax
• No, We Were Not Hit By A 500 Kilometer Asteroid On March 8th. Nor Will We Be Hit By Nibiru Any Time - It's BS!
• Petition: Let's End Dramatized Reporting Of "Doomsday" Stories - The Vulnerable Get Suicidal
• World Did NOT End On 29th July! AWFUL "Silly Season" Story - Journalists Please Be More Responsible
• Petition To Youtube To Halt Ads On Doomsday Videos - They Make The Vulnerable Suicidal

And you can tell from the hundreds of comments on those articles how many scared people there are, genuinely worried by Nibiru. It’s so sad, that they are so scared of such a daft idea, which I think most of them would admit is rather daft if they could just calm down enough to be able to connect to their basic common sense and good judgement. Especially young people and people who don’t have a strong background in science or astronomy.

See also my answer to Why do some people still believe in Nibiru?

This is a copy of my answer to When will Nibiru hit Earth?

[NOTE TO DEBUNKERS - you are welcome to copy / paste as much of this text as you like to use for your debunking comments on videos on youtube etc]

Lots more debunking here: Debunking Doomsday

And my new kindle and online ebook has a whole section on Nibiru

Doomsday Debunked (free online book - also available on kindle here: Doomsday Debunked (kindle):

For the Nibiru section look under: NIBIRU / PLANET X / TWO SUNS

(note, all proceeds from the kindle book will go to Befrienders international or other international suicide prevention charities)

That’s because it is by far the most common question I get asked by scared people, whether we have two suns, or whether there is a planet called Nibiru about to hit Earth.

It is just LOL silly fake Doomsday news to anyone with a basic understanding of the simplest astronomy. You can explain to a five year old child why the ideas are absurd.

But for some reason, this is what many people are scared of. Lots of people are making money out of it, with hoax videos on youtube earning many thousands of dollars a month just from the ad revenue, selling books, selling equipment to those who feel they need to prepare for the alleged impact. There’s even a company that sells super expensive very luxurious space in abandoned Russian nuclear bunkers in Eastern Germany to gullible billionaires and multi-millionaires.

Don’t be a sucker. Ignore it, it’s just the most outrageous BS, balderdash, humbug, tosh, whatever your favourite word is for people who speak garbage and make it sound as if they are saying something sensible.