The date is unclear, as are the murky references to the Bible, the Torah, and random Sumerian writings and astrological claims linked to Nibiru.
However, serious astronomers have not ruled out the possibility of a ninth planet – orbiting so far away as to re-draw our current understanding of the solar system.
The scientific suggestions are these: Uranus was discovered in 1781 but discrepancies in its orbit suggested that another celestial body must have been tugging at it.
In 1846 the mathematics and observations were proved right when Urbain Le Verrier, Johann Gottfried Galle, and John Couch Adams discovered Neptune in 1846.
Using the same principle some astronomers now think there may be another similar Neptune-sized planet orbiting the Sun once every 15,000 years.
And the theory is based on the movement of six so-called Trans-Neptunian Objects were observed by US scientists to be behaving strangely.
Trans-Neptunian Objects are small but significant chunks of rock left over from the creation of the solar system, which failed to coalesce into planets.
Even Pluto – once a ninth planet – has now been reclassified as a TNO.
But researchers at the famous California Institute of Technology noticed a handful of these space rocks were not where mathematics would put them – and concluded that a massive undiscovered planet’s gravitational pull might be warping their orbit slightly.
Their claims rocked both the scientific establishment and the internet conspiracy theorists, adding genuine astronomical credibility to what had thus far been a slightly bonkers claim for Nibiru or Planet X.
The claims suggested the planet was 10 times the mass of earth and trapped in an elliptical orbit around the Sun – coming close to Earth only once every 15,000 years.
Other astronomers including a team at the Canadian-French-Hawaiian project OSSOS dismissed the CALTECH claims explaining there were several cases of small planets behaving in this way across the universe.
But a Spanish team operating out of the Complutense University of Madrid countermanded the French using a new hyper-accurate astronomical technique examining Extreme Trans-Neptunian Objects (ETNOs).
One of the authors Carlos de la Fuente Marcos said: “If there is nothing to perturb them, the nodes of these extreme trans-Neptunian objects should be uniformly distributed, as there is nothing for them to avoid, but if there are one or more perturbers, two situations may arise.
“One possibility is that the ETNOs are stable, and in this case, they would tend to have their nodes away from the path of possible perturbers.
“But if they are unstable they would behave as the comets that interact with Jupiter do, that is tending to have one of the nodes close to the orbit of the hypothetical perturber.
“Assuming that the ETNOs are dynamically similar to the comets that interact with Jupiter, we interpret these results as signs of the presence of a planet that is actively interacting with them in a range of distances from 300 to 400 AU.”