We have all heard the story about Nibiru and how it’s headed to kill us all in 2012. After watching a Youtube video I decided to investigate this further. We followed a method from Youtube and navigated to where the supposed “Nibiru” is hiding on Google Sky. The anomaly appears in the constellation Leo.

The object can only be seen with Infrared mode. I headed over to Bad Astronomy and Universe Today (a forum of mainstream astronomers) to get their opinion on what this object could be… is it Nibiru?

“From IRAS: wouldn’t be Jupiter, since it was so bright that IRAS urned off its detectors when scanning past it (accounting for two long missing crescents in its survey). Mercury and Venus are out because IRAS had fixed solar arrays and sunshade, and always pointed nearly 90 degrees to the Sun. IRAS operated from January-November 1983. Saturn was already past Leo (it was there in 1979, I remember taking pictures of a conjunction with Mars and Jupiter also in Leo). Sooo – where was Mars? Could be – a quick check of the heavens-above interactive chart shows that Mars went right through that piece of western Leo in early September 1983 (at the right declination as well).
I can’t find immediately when IRAS scanned that area from ADS (I suspect Mars saturated the detectors, so there was no science analysis or calibration use possible), but it would have been roughly when Mars was at quadrature 90 degrees from the Sun. No, that’s not it; Mars was in roughly the right area but only about 30 degrees from the Sun.

How about large asteroids? I looked at the Aladin output for the IRAS catalog of asteroid sightings. Nothing especially bright in this part of the sky. Move along, nothing to see here…

Next try: look at the IRAS sky maps using Skyview. Whoa, there it is, bright enough for streak artifacts at 12 microns. Check coordinates – that’s just about where CW Leonis is, a long-period variable and carbon star. Ahhhhh, the ADS shows that this is also known as IRC +10216, which rings a bell as a dust-shrouded star which is among the brightest IR sources in the sky. Knowing that, I can get the IRAS fluxes, which are the brightest for any object I’ve ever checked (being a galaxy type and all). That sure looks like the ID. “

Many people that research Nibiru find CW Leonis but don’t do enough research to verify it. I decided to check more into this star and find out why it was only visible in Infrared view on many programs. This is what Wikipedia has to say

IRC +10216 or CW Leonis is the brightest and best studied carbon star, but also a very peculiar one with the central star being embedded in a thick dust envelope. Therefore, its energy is emitted mostly at infrared wavelengths: in fact, IRC +10216 is the brightest object in the sky at a wavelength of 10 μm. Recent speckle observations (Weigelt et al. 1998 A&A,333,51, Haniff and Buscher 1998 A&A,334,5) are beginning to show the complex structure of the dust envelope.

In conclusion, this Youtube video appears to be a bunch of garbage and should not be viewed as fact.