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Planet Nine: Recently Discovered Planet Could Wipe Out Earth This Month, Scientist Theorizes

By Pam Wright
Published on: 10:00 PST, Apr 7, 2016

A scientist is claiming that a mysterious planet — dubbed Planet Nine — wiped out Earth millions of years ago and could very well do it again this month.

Planet Nine is a new, Neptune-sized planet discovered in January lurking behind Pluto at the edge of the solar system.

While scientists have not conclusively “found” the planet, Daniel Whitmire, an astrophysicist at the University of Louisiana, is now claiming that the planet could wipe out Earth as it did some 20,000 years ago. More troubling, the scientist believes the cataclysm could come as early as this month, according to a report by the New York Post.

According to Whitmire, Planet Nine, which is believed to be 10 times more massive than Earth, orbits the Sun every 20,000 years and as it approaches Earth, knocks asteroids and comets toward our home.

Scientists believe fossil evidence indicates that most life on Earth is mysteriously wiped out every 26 million to 27 million years.

Whitmire claims Planet Nine’s passage through the Kuiper Belt, a field of icy objects and debris beyond Neptune, is responsible for the “extinction events.”

While this may be a legitimate threat, conspiracy theorists tend to predict end-of-the-world scenarios every few years or so.

In the ’80s and ’90s, conspiracy theorists warned of impending doom from a red dwarf planet called Nibiru or Nemesis, which orbits too close to Earth every 36,000 years. These theorists believed it was this red dwarf planet that was behind the cyclical termination of life on Earth.

Modern-day conspiracy theorists seem to be convinced that there will be a collision or a near miss before the end of April.

It is believed that an asteroid striking Earth would kill a significant amount of life on the planet and a dust cloud caused by the impact would block out the Sun, sparking deadly climate change.

Nemesis or Nibiru was widely dismissed as crackpot pseudo-science — until Planet Nine was identified in January by the California Institute of Technology.

Mystery continues to shroud Planet Nine, which has yet to be conclusively located, according to Scientific American.

Konstantin Batygin and Mike Brown, two planetary scientists from the California Institute of Technology, presented evidence for its existence this January, and scientists are working diligently to pin down its location.

Batygin and Brown used mathematical modeling and computer simulations to explain the strange clumping behavior of a group of dwarf planets in the Kuiper Belt.

While scientists scramble to understand the mysterious heavenly body and locate it, scientists are suggesting it might have originally been an exoplanet orbiting a neighboring star until our Sun stole it during its adolescence.

Experts are now saying that someone will likely spot the mysterious Planet Nine within as little as a year. (A little too late if we’re wiped out this month).

If Planet Nine is located, it would change the way we see our solar system and be a “monumental discovery,” according to David Gerdes, a cosmologist at the University of Michigan.

“Evidence is mounting that something unusual is out there — there’s a story that’s hard to explain with just the standard picture.”

In January, NASA warned that claims of Planet Nine lurking in our solar system are premature.

The space agency said the controversial Caltech paper claiming a ninth planet exists beyond Pluto was “just a prediction” and called for caution.

Needless to say, the theory that Earth will be wiped out by Planet Nine this month is even more premature.

[Image via Shutterstock]

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