The Dark Star: The Planet X Evidence by Andy Lloyd

which reside in a belt around the line of the ecliptic. Searching for
more distant objects along this ecliptic will often throw up these solar system
objects in the field of view, be they asteroids or short period comets.
    Trying to find the distant Dark Star among this array of galactic
stars, nebulae and clusters, creates the same difficulties already faced by
astronomers looking for other, nearer objects. Sagittarius is just not a great
place to hunt for new objects and, frankly, most astronomers avoid searching
there because of these difficulties. The plane of the sun’s planets, the
ecliptic, and the Milky Way, are like two great circles crossing the sky at
angles to one another.
    They cross over twice, in Sagittarius, and on the other side of
the sky, between Gemini and Taurus. And so, these locations are awkward places
to hunt for a faint, practically stationary source of light against the
backdrop of millions of others. 12 Not only that, but Sagittarius is
difficult to observe from the more northern latitudes, anyway. This is a hunt
for a needle in a haystack, with the lights turned off.
    Because of these problems astronomers like Dave Jewitt and Jane
Luu, famous for their discovery of the first trans-Neptunian object, avoid
searching for Edgeworth-Kuiper Objects (EKOs) at these nodal regions. Instead,
they turn their attention to the much darker constellations, like Pisces. 12 As a result, distant solar system objects are almost certainly going to be discovered
in the darker constellations, and if the Dark Star just happens to be located
in front of the Milky Way galaxy, well, it will probably remain undiscovered.
Furthermore, because its motion across the sky is negligible, it will remain in
this part of the sky for several generations to come.
    John Bagby and the Binary in
Sagittarius
    A gentleman who has long argued for the existence of a substantial
tenth planet is the engineer and amateur astronomer, John Bagby. He wrote
several papers outlining evidence he had put forward for the existence of a
Massive Solar Companion, or ‘MSC’. 13 Bagby was quite sure that such
a body existed, and he claimed to have data to prove it, if only someone would
listen. He shared this information with astronomers at the US Naval
Observatory, including Drs. Harrington and Van Flandern; Dr. Anderson at JPL
and Dr. Marsden, who collates sightings of new solar system bodies. He also
publicly presented his work at seminars and scientific meetings back in the
1970's.
    Bagby
produced papers between 1978 and 1980, which went unpublished, that set out his
observational data and theoretical underpinning for either a tenth planet, or a
massive solar companion. He claimed that the discovery of Pluto in Gemini was
located 180 degrees opposite to the massive undiscovered planet, and that the
pre-discovery prediction work of Lowell and Pickering could be put down to a
classical "direction finding and distance ambiguity". 13 In
other words, Lowell had been right, but had looked in the wrong direction.
Planet X lay in Sagittarius, Bagby claimed.
    This
proposal from the late 1970s finds itself in accordance with my own analysis of
the location of the Dark Star. Was John Bagby onto something?
    Problems
emerge for Bagby, when we come to look at his proposals about the size and
distance of the binary companion. Basically, Bagby was proposing a full-blown
brown dwarf in the Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt. 14 We’d be able to see it
with a regular telescope. How had he arrived at this fantastic, utterly
impossible, conclusion?
    It
turns out that Bagby was interested in the work of one E.R. Harrison who, in
1977, postulated the existence of a massive nearby body, lying in Sagittarius,
required to explain observational anomalies regarding a "pulsar period
time derivative". 15 This sounds like a bit of a mouthful,
doesn’t it? Simply put, pulsars are highly regular emitters of strong
radiation. If a gravitational field comes between a pulsar and us, as