Is 2012 end of the world?

The coming new year which is 2012, also happens to be the name of a 2009 Hollywood disaster film. We were all told that the world was ending as 2012 approached.

That film was based on, according to experts, a misinterpretation of the Mayan calender. But in the real world too, ‘scientific evidence’ is sought to be presented for the doomsday prediction for the year 2012.

There are fanciful stories floating on the Internet claiming that the Earth will face destruction in December 2012, more specifically on the winter solstice date of December 21. There are three general causes given, none of them have any validity and none of them make much sense, says John Goss of Astronomical League.

1. The favorite reason maintains that a large, mysterious celestial body either will collide with the Earth destroying life as we know it, or will closely pass our planet causing catastrophic earthquakes.

2. A more bizarre assertion is that on the winter solstice the sun aligns with the center of the Milky Way galaxy causing the sun and the Earth to enter into a “galactic beam,” possibly dragging the sun — with the Earth in tow — towards the center of the galaxy.

3. A third absurd claim is that there will be an alignment of the planets resulting in upheavals on Earth caused by either devastating gravitational or strange magnetic forces, or by massive solar flares.

There is no scientific evidence to support any of these claims. Here is what the scientific evidence does support:

A. No large body is approaching the Earth. No new large body has appeared in the solar system. No new body can be seen during daylight hours in the southern hemisphere — or the northern hemisphere, for that matter.

B. The sun does not align with the center of the Milky Way on December 21, 2012. In any case, the sun and the galactic center are located nowhere near each other in space with the sun on December 21 being about 91.5 million miles from Earth and the galactic
center situated two billion times farther at 27,000 light-years away.

C. There are no unusual alignments of the planets in 2012. Planets sometimes appear close to one another in the sky, but viewed in three dimensional space, they are tens of millions to hundreds of millions of miles apart.