The Dark Star: The Planet X Evidence (34 page)

This model presupposes that the perihelion distance of the Dark
Star is a variable over time and, as a result, the Permian may have witnessed
its closest and most devastating series of passages through the solar system.
The massive asteroid or comet impact recorded by the 250 million year old
crater in Woodleigh, Australia may have been part of this wider phenomenon.

The Cambrian Explosion and
'Snowball Earth'

New advances in molecular biology have allowed scientists to
back-track through the record of evolutionary change and date the various
points when great divergence in life on this planet occurred. The
Precambrian-Cambrian boundary of 540 million years ago represented a colossal
sea-change in the development of life on this planet. The sudden emergence of
an immense diversity of life forms at that time is known as the Cambrian
Explosion, but paleontologists now consider it likely that life was already
highly variable before this boundary. The boundary itself indicates a massive
carbon isotope shift, implying profound extinctions among late Proterozoic
life.
⁴
Severe cooling would have accompanied such changes as carbon
dioxide was catastrophically removed from the atmosphere.

In fact, such was the severity of the glaciation during the late
Proterozoic, that some scientists have theorized that our planet became
completely covered in ice...the so-called “Snowball Earth” effect.
^17,18
Again, there appears to have been a multiplicity of events over a period of
several million years, rather than a single “Snowball Earth” event. But what
could account for such a fundamental climate shift which saw glaciers forming
over the equator?

It is thought that the break-up of the then super-continent
'Rodinia' may have contributed to this effect, spreading the broken up
continents around the equator. This increased the global ratio of sea to land
and brought about increased rainfall which, in turn, scrubbed out the carbon
dioxide from the atmosphere. A positive feedback cycle then led to a series of
glaciations around the globe.

But surely this is not a satisfactory explanation. After all, the
current continental distribution is also located in a band around the globe,
and the last Ice Age was very mild in comparison. It is not clear what
preconditioned the Earth to go into such a calamitous freeze, the likes of
which have not been experienced again for 600 million years.

The 'Snowball Earth' scenario prior to the Precambrian/Cambrian
boundary is an extreme environmental condition, calling out for a bold
explanation. Again, I suggest that the precondition to this series of
catastrophic global glaciations was nothing less than a temporary expansion of
Earth's orbit. The Earth's greater distance from the sun would readily explain
the freezing over of the whole planet, and the orbital expansion of Earth would
be consistent with the variables associated with the orbit of the Dark Star.

The Late, Great Bombardment

Our third catastrophic series of events in the geological record
involves a massive bombardment of the solar system by comets and/or asteroids,
and possibly even minor planets. The cratered appearance of the Moon is largely
due to this intense bombardment of space debris that spiked between 3.8 and 3.9
billion years ago, and the Earth similarly suffered the most cataclysmic
bombardment in its history.
¹⁹

What puzzles astronomers is why this occurred so long after the
birth of the solar system. Once again, the bombardment appears to have been a
somewhat dragged out affair, implying intensely chaotic activity in the solar
system over a period lasting tens of millions of years. Then it all stopped.

This puzzle has recently been resurrected to form the basis for
the one-time existence of an additional planet, which initially formed between
Jupiter and Mars. Somehow, this planet took on an unstable orbit and crashed
into the sun, at least according to the “Planet V” theory.
²⁰
Another
theory holds that the bombardment was the result of a late formation of the
outer planets Neptune and Uranus.
¹⁹

This late formation might have been the result of the more thinly
spread material in the outer planetary zone, causing a longer accretion period.
But such a bombardment from outside the planetary solar system should have
catastrophically affected the Jovian moons as well. Once again, this period of
sustained catastrophe in the inner solar system calls for a radical solution
from 'outside the box'.

Sitchin's account of the Celestial Battle fits this 'lunar
cataclysm' event very well, as the missing planet located between Mars and
Jupiter (Tiamat; the primordial Earth) was bombarded by the planet Nibiru. This
was said to have occurred about 4 billion years ago, some time after the solar
system had formed.
²

It seems reasonable to me to speculate that this 'late, great
bombardment' was the work of a brown dwarf, from the sun's birthing stellar
nursery, moving catastrophically through the early solar system. The subsequent
interaction with the planets and the sun resulted in its capture, and a then
sustained bombardment of cosmic debris. But this is where I think Sitchin's
account is itself insufficient, because the very nature of the cataclysm was a
temporary one, lasting at most 100 million years. Something happened after that
point to draw the cataclysmic activities to an end.

Returning to the calculations by Hills regarding the effect of a
captured dwarf on the planetary solar system
⁴
, the intruder brown
dwarf and its retinue would be first captured into a temporary orbit of some
eccentricity. This is consistent with Sitchin's model, and for tens of million
years Nibiru appears to have actually returned to the inner solar system,
bringing repeated catastrophic effects to the inner planets. During that time,
the Earth was pummeled by thousands of asteroids, many far larger than the one
that killed off the dinosaurs.

Then it all stopped. Why? If Nibiru's orbit was a stable one that
continues to this day, then surely the cosmic melee would have been a constant
feature of the solar system for the last 3.9 billion years?

The answer lies in the notion that the Dark Star orbit calculated
by Hills is a temporary one. If the logic of astrophysicists like Matese and
Whitmire is to be applied
⁷
, then this captured brown dwarf underwent
massive orbital expansion, eventually locating it safely into the outer Oort
cloud. In other words, as time went by, the highly eccentric orbit that had
arisen as a result of its capture by the sun loosened.

The Dark Star slowly migrated out beyond the EKB. Its binding
energy decreased, and the other planets in the solar system would have then
been pulled closer to the sun. As part of that process, the Earth itself
migrated towards the sun, bringing its anomalous body of oceanic waters with
it.

The Dark Star ended up outside the planetary solar system about
3.8 billion years ago. At that distance it could do no more than shower down a
few long period comets, most of which would be intercepted by the solar
system's sweeper, Jupiter. The bombardment had ended after about 100 million
years, and the brown dwarf had taken on a slow, distant orbit around the sun.
But, as we have seen, this was not the end of the story. More extinction events
were to manifest themselves in the geological record, taking on peculiar
attributes, like the ones we have considered above.

There is a common adage in science that the more you study a
phenomenon, the more confusing it becomes. I think it is self-evident that the
material I have presented here is complex and by no means clear-cut. Each of the
three examples I have offered provide their own mystery, but taken together
they lead to even greater obfuscation.

The common thread between them is that they all involve unusual or
unique activity over a period of some millions of years. Then the activity
stops. A careful analysis of the bombardment events 3.9 billion years ago seems
to vindicate Sitchin's claim about a cosmic interloper of extraordinary
significance. Yet, the effect disappears as quickly as it occurred, and this
turns out to be a significant issue. The theoretical models for such a
planetary intrusion predict eccentric orbital properties, but for only a
limited number of orbits.

Where some might argue that a planet in such an unstable orbit
might fall into the sun, or be ejected outright from the solar system, I would
argue a middle position between these two extremes. The Dark Star orbit simply
changes from one phase to another as a result of various external influences
over time, and these phase changes are what brings about the cataclysms we have
seen on Earth at some of the Epoch boundaries described above. This is a rather
straightforward conclusion that arises from a chaotic and often confusing
collection of data sets, which makes it a rather thrilling possibility because
science generally prefers to seek out a simple solution to a complicated
problem.

Drs. Murray and Matese both point to their non-random data sets of
long-period comet orbits
^21,9
, and claim the existence of a small
brown dwarf/giant planet slowly meandering around the sun among the comets. Yet
they struggle with the problem of how the sun ended up collecting such an
object into its family.

It could not have accreted normally among the comets, as the
material available at that distance was too scant. So it must have been
captured, and such an event would most likely have occurred early in the
lifetime of the solar system. This is because the stellar nursery where the sun
was born was relatively dense with stars and dwarfs during that period of time.
An interstellar passer-by, entering the fray later on, is much less likely to
be a candidate for capture by the sun.

In either event, the capture of a Dark Star surely would have
taken place reasonably closer to the sun itself, or else this brown dwarf would
have continued past, oblivious to Sol's influence. Dr. Daniel Whitmire, a
leading scientific thinker in the Nemesis debate, suggests that comets expand
out into the Oort cloud from an initial location closer to the sun and that the
giant planet would have done the same. As such, the binary brown dwarf would
have started life located between one and ten thousand astronomical units from
the sun - when the solar system formed - before its orbit became affected by
external influences like passing stars.
²²
He hypothesizes that this
influence led to the planet's orbit expanding into the outer Oort cloud, but
it's possible that the planet could just have easily been swung into the
direction of the sun, thereby entering the fray of Sitchin's Celestial Battle.
After all, that's also what happens to comets.

The Dark Star would have been captured, and then pursued a series
of violent bouts of destruction in the planetary zone, before then drifting out
into a wider orbit. It will be evident to the reader that the patterns of
change in the outer solar system have built into them far more flexibility than
the planets closer to home. This is because the sun's stranglehold on these
denizens of the peripheries of our system is so much less. We are therefore
quite entitled to talk about migrating orbits and changing trajectories for
bodies like the Dark Star, and it is this factor that creates the potential for
the binary brown dwarf to shape and re-shape the planetary solar system.

In the next chapter, we will look in more detail at how the Dark
Star might well be the mysterious factor behind the coming and going of Ice
Ages, and how this should give us pause for thought about our current
predicament regarding global warming.

¹
H.G. Wells “The Star” 1899 With thanks to Rob Astor

²
Z. Sitchin “The Twelfth Planet” Avon 1976

³
J. Hills “Comet Showers and the Steady-state infall of comets
from the Oort Cloud” Astron. J. 86, 1730 (1981)

⁴
J. Hills “The Passage of a “Nemesis”-like Object through the
Planetary System” Astron. J. 90, 1876 (1985)

⁵
R. Corfield “Architects of Eternity” Headline Book Publishing
2001

⁶
G. Hancock, R. Bauval & J. Grigsby “The Mars Mystery” Ch 23
Penguin 1998

⁷
R. Muller “Nemesis - The Death Star” Weidenfield & Nicholson,
1988

⁸
J. Roach “Mystery Undersea Extinction Cycle Discovered” National
Geographic News 9th March 2005, with thanks to Lee Covino

⁹
J. Matese, P. Whitman and D. Whitmire, “Cometary Evidence of a
Massive Body in the Outer Oort Cloud” Icarus, 141, 354-336 (1999)

¹⁰
C. Sagan “Pale Blue Dot” Ch 11 Headline 1995

¹¹
M. Heil “Math Program Cracks Cause of Venus Climate Change” 12th
March 2001
http://www.jpl.nasa.gov

¹²
M. Edwards “Glacial Records Depict Ice Age Climate In Synch
Worldwide” National Science Foundation 24/3/04, with thanks to James Monds

¹³
Illinois State Museum “Ice Ages”
http://www.museum.state.il.us/exhibits/ice_ages/

¹⁴
W. Alvarez “T. Rex and the Crater of Doom” Penguin 1998

¹⁵
“Report on the Task Force on Potentially Hazardous Near Earth
Objects” September 2000, British National Space Centre, London citing L. O'
Hanlon “Killer Crater Found”
http://www.discovery.com/news/briefs/20000419/geology_crater.html

¹⁶
I Dalziel “Earth Before Pangea” Scientific American, Aug 1994

¹⁷
P. Hoffman & D. Schrag “Snowball Earth” Scientific American,
Jan 2000

¹⁸
Horizon “Snowball Earth” Shown on BBC2, 22nd Feb 2001

¹⁹
I. Semeniuk “Neptune Attacks” New Scientist 7th Apr. 2001

²⁰
G. Birdsall “Tenth Planet Did Exist Claims NASA” UFO Magazine
Jun. 2002

²¹
J. Murray. Mon. Not. R. Astron. Soc., 309, 31-34 (1999)

²²
Earthfile “A Mysterious “Perturber” at the Edges of Our Solar
System?” Linda Moulton Howe interviewing Dr. Daniel Whitmire,
http://www.earthfiles.com/earth086.htm1999