No, it's impossible. Not in an elliptical orbit coming into the inner solar system (there is still a chance of a Mars or Earth sized planet orbiting in a circular orbit way beyond Pluto).
This is a particularly silly story about Nibiru in the Daily Telegraph
The end of the world now predicted for December say doomsday groups
I think it is perhaps meant as a joke, not written entirely seriously in tone. Still - some do take all this seriously, and it doesn't include any astronomical facts in it. And humour sometimes is easy for some readers to miss in print.
Amateur astronomers with good telescopes can spot Pluto, with a ten inch telescope. That's not a particularly big telescope.
This telescope is large enough to spot Pluto, at a distance of 7.5 billion kilometers. Pluto's diameter is 2,372 km, smaller than our Moon. How to Scope Out Pluto in the Night Sky Friday
There may be undiscovered large planets in our solar system, maybe as large as Mars, even Earth. But they would be many times the distance to Pluto away, in the very distant Oort cloud -where it's thought there's a vast population of icy bodies of many sizes stretching much of the way to the nearest stars. If they were as close as Pluto, or even, several times the distance to Pluto, we'd be able to spot them easily, even in a ten inch telescope.
Asteroids are detected nowadays by medium sized professional telescopes, with by far the most capable currently, Pan-STARRS
Here it is with one of its images
It takes two 1.4 gigapixel images every minute, all night, every night, looking for asteroids. It is optimized for this hunt, with a high sensitivity wide field, and with a Schmidth Cassegrain construction which means that the images are crisp and clear, without any distortion, right to the edges of its very wild field of view.
And - it is not operated by NASA. It is managed by the PS1 Science Consortium consisting of ten institutions from four countries, and is under the auspices of the University of Hawaii.
So if you think there is a conspiracy hiding Nibiru - then all of those institutions would have to be in on it.
But not only that, also all amateur astronomers world wide with telescopes of ten inches or more. It's just totally silly and absurd.
Pan-STARRS is doing a great job of finding asteroids. We have already found ALL THE ASTEROIDS OF TEN KILOMETERS IN DIAMETER OR LARGER inside of Jupiter. So not even a ten kilometer asteroid could be hiding there, never mind a planet. Also 90% of the one kilometer asteroids, and finding a new one kilometer asteroid every month. They expect to reach 99% coverage of one kilometer asteroids by the 2020s.
Nowadays amateurs don't have a chance of finding one and they have given up trying. Instead they do the follow up observations, where they are very much needed. With thousands of asteroids to follow, the professional telescopes can't keep up.
With most of the big ones found - if a big one was headed our way, one as big as the asteroid that ended the dinosaur era, we'd be likely to have a couple of decades warning before it got close to Earth. And with all of the ones in NEO space found already, that makes it an estimated perhaps less than one in ten million chance that we get hit by one of those in the next century. I.e. 99.99999% certain that we don't get hit by anything as big as ten kilometers in the next century. Many blockbuster movie goers would guess it is perhaps a 50% chance :).
Now the asteroid threat is significant. But the ones we need to worry about now, since the biggest ones are all mapped in NEO space and the one kilometer ones will probably soon be also - the ones we need to pay attention to now are the smaller ones. A 100 meter asteroid hitting Earth in the wrong place could be very bad news for an entire country. Here is Brian May talking about the effect of a 100 meter asteroid if it hit London.
All this doom saying Nibiru and other armageddon nonsense is distracting people from a real threat, which we can actually do something about. We can predict, evacuate if necessary - but if we discover them a couple of decades in advance, we can deflect them also.
Astronomers know how to detect them. The issue is funding.
Our Earth based telescopes can't look in the direction of the sun - they can't operate in daylight. So, if a meteorite approaches Earth pretty much directly from the direction of the sun, we can't see it until it hits, or moments before, as it enters the atmosphere.
That's why nobody spotted the Russian Chelyabinsk meteor. If it had come from any other direction, they'd have had at least quite a few hours of warning, maybe as much as a day. But it came almost directly from the direction of the sun.
We can fix this with a space mirror. The B612 foundation has one designed, which they could launch by 2019 if they had the funding. It would find nearly every NEO of 20 meters diameter upwards quickly, orbiting close to Venus, looking outwards towards Earth's orbit, in the infrared.
And the total cost is $450 million Asteroid Hunt: Private Groups Join Search for Dangerous Space Rocks
But they are struggling to raise enough funding, getting less than a tenth of what they expected from donations.
NASA was never going to fund it, just provide support. But it has dropped this support now. NASA drops partnership with private asteroid hunt.
They might possibly fund the less capable Near-Earth Object Camera which will be positioned at the L1 position between Earth and sun instead of in an orbit close to Venus, but will help with asteroids of 140 meters diameter or larger. It is competing with other non asteroid related projects, so I wouldn't pin our hopes on it quite yet. And though certainly a major step forward, it won't find the more numerous, and still dangerous, 100 meter or smaller in diameter asteroids.
Sentinel is still continuing as a project without NASA support.
By comparison, the NASA budget for the ISS in 2015 was three billion dollars.
And a new destroyer costs getting on for $2 billion Arleigh Burke-class destroyer
And the totally useless (in my view) Trident submarines will cost the UK government $100 billion. No to Trident
For that, we could fund Sentinel 200 times over. I'm not sure we have our priorities right here. The price is low enough so that a private investor, if some billionaire took an interest in the project, could fund the whole thing.
But anyway to summarize: Nibiru is just silly.
For more on this, see Is it true that an asteroid will strike earth on 24 September 2015?
I've also written up some of these answers as a kindle book:
How Can You Tell If an Asteroid Is Headed Your Way?: The Truth Behind Asteroid Scare Stories (Amazon kindle)
which is also available to read online for free at Giant Asteroid Headed Your Way? - How We Can Detect And Deflect Them
I got lots of questions on the Science20 version of this post, by some very scared people who needed much reassuring that Nibiru is indeed real and not a hoax.
Turned up some interesting stuff also about double suns, mirages, search for planet X etc.
So I did a longer version with all this. It's moderately long, 99 pagese. You can get it as a booklet here
"Imaginary Bullshit Planet" Nibiru: Lens Flares, Sun Mirages, Hoaxes, & Just Plain Silly (Amazon kindle)
Or read for free online at "Imaginary Bullshit Planet" Nibiru - Lens Flares, Sun Mirages, Hoaxes & Just Plain Silly
This is a particularly silly story about Nibiru in the Daily Telegraph
The end of the world now predicted for December say doomsday groups
"Terrifying stuff. Apparently, the planet due to collide with us is often visible, you may have seen it already. If you spot a blob next to the sun when you take a photograph, it could be the deadly planet, not a reflection."
I think it is perhaps meant as a joke, not written entirely seriously in tone. Still - some do take all this seriously, and it doesn't include any astronomical facts in it. And humour sometimes is easy for some readers to miss in print.
Amateur astronomers with good telescopes can spot Pluto, with a ten inch telescope. That's not a particularly big telescope.
This telescope is large enough to spot Pluto, at a distance of 7.5 billion kilometers. Pluto's diameter is 2,372 km, smaller than our Moon. How to Scope Out Pluto in the Night Sky Friday
There may be undiscovered large planets in our solar system, maybe as large as Mars, even Earth. But they would be many times the distance to Pluto away, in the very distant Oort cloud -where it's thought there's a vast population of icy bodies of many sizes stretching much of the way to the nearest stars. If they were as close as Pluto, or even, several times the distance to Pluto, we'd be able to spot them easily, even in a ten inch telescope.
Asteroids are detected nowadays by medium sized professional telescopes, with by far the most capable currently, Pan-STARRS
Here it is with one of its images
It takes two 1.4 gigapixel images every minute, all night, every night, looking for asteroids. It is optimized for this hunt, with a high sensitivity wide field, and with a Schmidth Cassegrain construction which means that the images are crisp and clear, without any distortion, right to the edges of its very wild field of view.
And - it is not operated by NASA. It is managed by the PS1 Science Consortium consisting of ten institutions from four countries, and is under the auspices of the University of Hawaii.
So if you think there is a conspiracy hiding Nibiru - then all of those institutions would have to be in on it.
But not only that, also all amateur astronomers world wide with telescopes of ten inches or more. It's just totally silly and absurd.
Pan-STARRS is doing a great job of finding asteroids. We have already found ALL THE ASTEROIDS OF TEN KILOMETERS IN DIAMETER OR LARGER inside of Jupiter. So not even a ten kilometer asteroid could be hiding there, never mind a planet. Also 90% of the one kilometer asteroids, and finding a new one kilometer asteroid every month. They expect to reach 99% coverage of one kilometer asteroids by the 2020s.
Nowadays amateurs don't have a chance of finding one and they have given up trying. Instead they do the follow up observations, where they are very much needed. With thousands of asteroids to follow, the professional telescopes can't keep up.
With most of the big ones found - if a big one was headed our way, one as big as the asteroid that ended the dinosaur era, we'd be likely to have a couple of decades warning before it got close to Earth. And with all of the ones in NEO space found already, that makes it an estimated perhaps less than one in ten million chance that we get hit by one of those in the next century. I.e. 99.99999% certain that we don't get hit by anything as big as ten kilometers in the next century. Many blockbuster movie goers would guess it is perhaps a 50% chance :).
Now the asteroid threat is significant. But the ones we need to worry about now, since the biggest ones are all mapped in NEO space and the one kilometer ones will probably soon be also - the ones we need to pay attention to now are the smaller ones. A 100 meter asteroid hitting Earth in the wrong place could be very bad news for an entire country. Here is Brian May talking about the effect of a 100 meter asteroid if it hit London.
All this doom saying Nibiru and other armageddon nonsense is distracting people from a real threat, which we can actually do something about. We can predict, evacuate if necessary - but if we discover them a couple of decades in advance, we can deflect them also.
Astronomers know how to detect them. The issue is funding.
Our Earth based telescopes can't look in the direction of the sun - they can't operate in daylight. So, if a meteorite approaches Earth pretty much directly from the direction of the sun, we can't see it until it hits, or moments before, as it enters the atmosphere.
That's why nobody spotted the Russian Chelyabinsk meteor. If it had come from any other direction, they'd have had at least quite a few hours of warning, maybe as much as a day. But it came almost directly from the direction of the sun.
We can fix this with a space mirror. The B612 foundation has one designed, which they could launch by 2019 if they had the funding. It would find nearly every NEO of 20 meters diameter upwards quickly, orbiting close to Venus, looking outwards towards Earth's orbit, in the infrared.
And the total cost is $450 million Asteroid Hunt: Private Groups Join Search for Dangerous Space Rocks
But they are struggling to raise enough funding, getting less than a tenth of what they expected from donations.
NASA was never going to fund it, just provide support. But it has dropped this support now. NASA drops partnership with private asteroid hunt.
They might possibly fund the less capable Near-Earth Object Camera which will be positioned at the L1 position between Earth and sun instead of in an orbit close to Venus, but will help with asteroids of 140 meters diameter or larger. It is competing with other non asteroid related projects, so I wouldn't pin our hopes on it quite yet. And though certainly a major step forward, it won't find the more numerous, and still dangerous, 100 meter or smaller in diameter asteroids.
Sentinel is still continuing as a project without NASA support.
By comparison, the NASA budget for the ISS in 2015 was three billion dollars.
And a new destroyer costs getting on for $2 billion Arleigh Burke-class destroyer
And the totally useless (in my view) Trident submarines will cost the UK government $100 billion. No to Trident
For that, we could fund Sentinel 200 times over. I'm not sure we have our priorities right here. The price is low enough so that a private investor, if some billionaire took an interest in the project, could fund the whole thing.
But anyway to summarize: Nibiru is just silly.
For more on this, see Is it true that an asteroid will strike earth on 24 September 2015?
I've also written up some of these answers as a kindle book:
How Can You Tell If an Asteroid Is Headed Your Way?: The Truth Behind Asteroid Scare Stories (Amazon kindle)
which is also available to read online for free at Giant Asteroid Headed Your Way? - How We Can Detect And Deflect Them
UPDATE
I got lots of questions on the Science20 version of this post, by some very scared people who needed much reassuring that Nibiru is indeed real and not a hoax.
Turned up some interesting stuff also about double suns, mirages, search for planet X etc.
So I did a longer version with all this. It's moderately long, 99 pagese. You can get it as a booklet here
Or read for free online at "Imaginary Bullshit Planet" Nibiru - Lens Flares, Sun Mirages, Hoaxes & Just Plain Silly
About the Author
Robert Walker
Writer of articles on Mars and Space issues - Software Developer of Tune Smithy, Bounce Metronome etc.Studied at Wolfson College, Oxford
Lives in Isle of Mull
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