Comet showers from Planet 9 could bomb Earth’s surface and kill all life, scientist warns

Another end-of-life on Earth warning was made by a scientist on Wednesday. Planetary movements, of late, has been speculated as the reason behind a spate of dire warnings, ranging from 15 days of darkness to the moon turning green for 90 minutes.

Daniel Whitmire, of the University of Louisiana, warns that Planet 9, discovered by scientists in January, triggers comet showers that bomb the Earth’s surface. He says the showers are capable of killing all life on Earth.

Whitmire explains Planet 9’s behaviour to its passing the Kuiper Belt, an area filled with , as part of its 20,000-year orbit around the sun. When Planet 9 is at its closest to Earth, it hits asteroids and comets toward Earth. The Sun cites also fossil evidence that suggests most life on Earth is wiped out every 26 million to 27 million years, which appears to back Whitmire’s theory.

A red dwarf planet, which conspiracy theorists in the 1980s and 1990s called Nibiru or Nemesis, and orbits too close to the Earth every 36,000 years, was speculated to be behind the human planet’s extinction event. Scientists dismissed the existence of the red dwarf planet until the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) identified it in January.

According to models made by Mike Brown and Konstantin Batygin, Caltech astronomers, Planet 9 has a highly elliptical orbit and comes no closer than 200 times the Earth-sun distance up to 1,200 times at its farthest orbit. Based on the planet’s gravitational influence, the two estimate its mass to 10 times that of Earth, made up of a solid core and a cold, dense layer of gas, reports Discovery.

To reckon the planet’s temperature and size, Christoph Mordasini and Esther Linder, astronomers at the University of Bern in Switzerland, used estimates made by Caltech scientists on Planet 9’s physical size and mass. They estimate it has a radius 3.7 times that of the Earth and upper atmosphere temperature of -226 degrees Celsius, taking into account its predicted orbit around the sun and age of the solar system.

The Bern scientists’ study would be published in the Astronomy & Astrophysics journal. Discovery points out that before astronomers see a faint signal of Planet 9 the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope near Cerro Tololo in Chile must first be finished.