<sarcasm> Oh good, I get to write yet another article about factually challenged fearmongering nonsense. </sarcasm>
Sigh.
Quite a few people on Twitter and Facebook pointed out this one to me. The guilty party is an article in UK tabloid The Sun. It had this breathless (and grossly ridiculous) headline: “Mysterious Planet Wiped Out Life on Earth Once and Could Do It Again THIS MONTH”.
Yeah, not so much. The article itself then goes on to make a series of increasingly shaky and completely wrong claims (what follows are direct quotations from the article):
“Planet Nine – a new planet discovered at the edge of the solar system in January – has triggered comet showers that bomb the Earth’s surface, killing all life, says Daniel Whitmire, of the University of Louisiana.”
“Professor Whitmire claims Planet Nine’s passage through a rock laden area called the Kuiper Belt is responsible for the ‘extinction events’.”
“Now some are convinced there will be a collision or a near miss before the end of April.”
“Nemesis or Nibiru were widely dismissed as crack-pot pseudo-science – until Planet Nine was identified in January by the California Institute of Technology, in the US.”
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