"The idea of computing a body's displacement as an area in time-velocity space is usually traced back to 14th-century Europe. I show that in four ancient Babylonian cuneiform tablets, Jupiter's displacement along the ecliptic is computed as the area of a trapezoidal figure obtained by drawing its daily displacement against time.This interpretation is prompted by a newly discovered tablet on which the same computation is presented in an equivalent arithmetical formulation.The tablets date from 350 to 50 BCE.The trapezoid procedures offer the first evidence for the use of geometrical methods in Babylonian mathematical astronomy, which was thus far viewed as operating exclusively with arithmetical concepts."

With an elliptical orbit of 10,000 or 20,000 of our years, this planet may not be Nibiru, which has an orbit of about 3600 of our years. However, this prediction of a likely additional planet in our solar system is exciting news. Perhaps the search will lead us to either finding Nibiru, or perhaps we'll find that something has changed and impacted Nibiru's orbit since the last time it orbited Earth. I have my doubts, but since I'm not an astronomer, I'll keep an open mind. I don't think this is Nibiru.

"Two astronomers reported on Wednesday that they had compelling signs of something bigger and farther away - something that would definitely satisfy the current definition of a planet, where Pluto falls short.

'We are pretty sure there's one out there', said Michael E. Brown, a professor of planetary astronomy at the California Institute of Technology.

What Dr. Brown and a fellow Caltech professor, Konstantin Batygin, have not done is actually find that planet, so it would be premature to revise mnemonics of the planets just yet.

Rather, in a paper published Wednesday in The Astronomical Journal, Dr. Brown and Dr. Batygin lay out a detailed circumstantial argument for the planet's existence in what astronomers have observed - a half-dozen small bodies in distant, highly elliptical orbits.

What is striking, the scientists said, is that the orbits of all six loop outward in the same quadrant of the solar system and are tilted at about the same angle. The odds of that happening by chance are about 1 in 14,000, Dr. Batygin said.

A ninth planet could be gravitationally herding them into these orbits.

For the calculations to work, the planet would be quite large - at least as big as Earth, and likely much bigger - a mini-Neptune with a thick atmosphere around a rocky core, with perhaps 10 times the mass of Earth.

It would dwarf Pluto, at about 4,500 times its mass.

Pluto, at its most distant, is 4.6 billion miles from the sun. The potential ninth planet, at its closest, would be about 20 billion miles away; at its farthest, it could be 100 billion miles away. It would take from 10,000 to 20,000 years to complete one orbit around the sun."

"Another strange result in the simulations: A few Kuiper belt objects were knocked into orbits perpendicular to the plane of planetary orbits. Dr. Brown remembered that five objects had been found in perpendicular orbits.

'They're exactly where we predicted them to be', Dr. Brown said. 'That's when my jaw hit my floor. I think this is actually right.'"