FT Chronicle

WASHINGTON — NASA space agency has launched a campaign to dispel widespread rumors of world’ demise on December 21, 2012, last Monday.

End of time will come when an unknown Planet X or Nibiru collides into Earth. The planet was supposedly discovered by the Sumerians, according to assertions by Internet theorists.

For the possibility of comets instead of a planet, “big hits are very rare,” NASA noted. The last major impact was believed to be 65 million years ago, spurring the end of dinosaurs. “We have already determined that there are no threatening asteroids as large as the one that killed the dinosaurs,” the space agency said.

Internet users also accuse NASA of hiding the truth on the planet’s existence, but NASA criticized such tales as an “Internet hoax.”

“There is no factual basis for these claims,” NASA said in a question-and-answer posting on its website.

If such a collision were real “astronomers would have been tracking it for at least the past decade, and it would be visible by now to the naked eye,” it added. “Obviously, it does not exist.”

“Credible scientists worldwide know of no threat associated with 2012,” NASA insisted.

NASA insisted the Mayan calendar in fact does not end on December 21, 2012, saying that a new period will come after. And it said there are no planetary alignments on the horizon for the next few decades and even if the planets were to line up as some have forecast, the effect on our planet would be “negligible,” NASA said.

Among the other theories NASA has set out to debunk are that geomagnetic storms, a pole reversal or unsteadiness in the Earth’s crust might destroy the planet.

News via Agence France-Presse