Pseudoastronomy

The fault in our stars Pseudoastronomy

Adding epicycles

2012 apocalypse Hercólubus Crust displacement Daily Plane Time Cube Who Built the Moon?

Epicyclists

Maurice Cotterell Richard Hoagland Robert W. Felix David Talbott Suspicious0bservers Ted Holden v - t - e

Pseudoastronomy (not to be confused with astrology) is a subset of pseudophysics that claims to have found additional astronomical bodies, different ways of forming/developing astronomical bodies, different physics of the Universe, or just straight-up doom-mongering. And of course, creationists have found many very scientific-sounding ways to explain away problems in their 6,000-year-old Earth.

Many of these pseudoastronomical claims fall into the category of "Earth changes", which is as vague as it is apocalyptic.

None of these theories are scientifically supported.

Additional astronomical bodies

• Planet X: A hypothetical tenth ninth planet. It's used in a wide variety of pseudoastronomy, so claims about its nature are inconsistent.
• Nibiru: Like Planet X, but more Zecharia Sitchin-y.
• Hercólubus: A giant planet that will fly by Earth, cause volcanoes to erupt and kill everyone in a cataclysm. The only solution is astral projection.
• Nuitari Lilith, a claimed second moon of Ansalon Earth so dark that it is invisible.
• Vulcan: no, not Mr. Spock's home, but an alleged planet further into the Sun than Mercury.

Different formation/development methods

Planetary

• Flat Earth: The Earth is flat. What holds it up? Nobody knows! Promoted by B.o.B and the Flat Earth Society among others.
• Hollow Earth: The Earth is hollow. Something weird is inside (maybe aliens/crystals/Nazis) and the GOVERNMENT IS COVERING IT UP! Promoted by Ernst Zündel and Richard Shaver, among others.
• Expanding Earth: The Earth is expanding. Originally the scientific consensus, now inhabited by cranks alone.
• Atlantis, Lemuria, and Mu: Lost continents with lost civilizations that fell to the ocean floor. How this didn't radically affect sea levels worldwide is a question we can't answer.
• The idea that there was a planet between Mars and Jupiter that was destroyed and formed the asteroid belt.

Lunar

• Hollow Moon. The Moon is hollow and actually an alien spaceship parked in Earth orbit. NASA of course hides it. WAKE UP

Solar

• Stellar metamorphosis: Stars are planets. CreatAdvocated by Jeffrey Wolynski.
• Solar fission: The sun initially formed without planets, then flung the planets off in pairs. Theorized by Thomas Van Flandern.
• Solar binary: The Sun is a binary, its companion being an invisible brown dwarf.

Universal

• Cellular cosmogony: The Earth's surface is the inside surface of a sphere. The entire Universe fits within this sphere, because of gravitational distortion. Right.

Alternate physics

• Geocentrism: The Earth is the center of the Universe. Promoted by Galileo Was Wrong, The Church Was Right and Robert Sungenis among others.
• Galactocentricity: The Milky Way is the center of the Universe. (Note that both geocentrism and galactocentrism cannot both be correct, since the Earth is not the center of the Milky Way.)
• Fixedearth.com: The Earth doesn't move.
• Electric Universe: Electromagnetism > gravity.
• Hyperdimensional physics: This fantasy was pseudo-elucidated by Richard Hoagland and Mike Bara in their book Dark Mission (2007). One tenet of the faith is that all energy originates from a "higher state" outside three-dimensional space.
• Welteislehre, Nazi pseudoscience

Doom-mongering

• Geomagnetism: A geomagnetic reversal will end civilization and/or life as we know it! Discount the previous 170-171 times this has happened in the past 76 million years!
• Pole shift: Earth will flip over, and human civilization will flip its shit.
• Comet Elenin: It's gonna fuck shit up.Oh wait... it passed by harmlessly and then disintegrated. Never mind.
• CW Leonis: It's obviously Nibiru and/or Comet Elenin and/or impending doom!

Creationism

• Lunar bukkake hypothesis: The Great Flood shot water into the Moon, all over the Moon's face. Solves the "why are there craters on the moon if it's 6000 years old" problem.
• Catastrophic plate tectonics: The Great Flood screwed up the continents. Solves the "obvious evidence of plate tectonics disproves a Young Earth" problem.
• Anisotropic synchrony convention: Light travels instantaneously towards you but half the speed of light away. Solves the starlight problem.
• c-decay: Light speed slows down over time. Solves the starlight problem.
• White hole cosmology: The Earth is/was in a "white hole" that slows down its time. Solves the starlight problem.

People

Promoters

• Immanuel Velikovsky: Most of modern physics is wrong, but the Old Testament is obviously true because of "comparative mythology."

• Ted Holden: Promotes Velikovsky's work.
• David Talbott: Promotes Velikovsky's work.

• Maurice Cotterell: Claims that the Sun directly affects female fertility, civilizational rise and fall, and human life and death.
• Mike Bara: Among Bara's many mistaken ideas about astronomy, he's a proponent of solar fission--which was a favorite of the maverick astronomer Thomas Van Flandern.
• Stephen J. Crothers: Rejects most of modern physics, with a special emphasis on the claim that black holes do not exist.
• Richard C. Hoagland: Whines about NASA and finds weird-looking shit on Mars.
• James McCanney: Both the Sun and comets are electrically charged. Comets contain no ice whatsoever.
• ZetaTalk: A cult that claims to talk with aliens. Claimed that Nibiru would pass Earth in 2003; it didn't.
• Time Cube: Gene Ray's idiocy knows no bounds.
• Stars are Souls: Stars are souls. No, really.
• David Icke: Depending on his mood, claims the Moon is either hollow, an alien spacecraft, an interdimensional portal or doesn't exist at all. He also makes unusual claims about Saturn.
• W. Cleon Skousen: A Mormon apologist who believed that God's home planet, Kolob, exists in orbit around Sagittarius A*, what we now believe the be the super-massive black hole at the center of the Milky Way.
• Scientology: The Xenu mythology posits a galactic federation ruled the Milky Way 75,000,000 years ago. Hubbard, in official church scripture, recounts events occurring "four quadrillion" years in the past, or about 289,855 times older than the current age of the Universe.
• Robert Temple and his writings on the Dogon

Skeptics

• Phil Plait
• Stuart Robbins
• Neil deGrasse Tyson

See also

For those of you in the mood, RationalWiki has a fun article about Scientific Geoterrapinism.

• Pseudoscience
• List of predictions of the end of the world

External links

• Bad Astronomy, Phil Plait's site at Slate Magazine.

• Bad Astronomy, the blog at Discover Magazine.
• Bad Astronomy, the original website.

• Exposing PseudoAstronomy by Stuart Robbins

• EP Podcast
• EP on Facebook

Notes

Articles on RationalWiki related to pseudo-studies

Pseudoarchaeology - Pseudoastronomy - Pseudohistory - Pseudolaw - Pseudolinguistics - Pseudomathematics - Pseudoscience - Pseudopsychology - Pseudoscience list - Pseudoscience in advertising - Pseudoskepticism - Pseudovitamin