--- title: "We Hired An Astronomer To Break The Orbit. Nine Dates Fit Anyway." dek: "We paid an astronomer to redo the fit under rules published before she saw the data. One bound ellipse takes all nine anchors, perihelion inside the asteroid belt, and the code ran clean on a stranger's machine." kind: explainer (Explainer) desk: Suppressed Science author: Ambrose Teague and Dr. Ilse Vantongeren (fictional) published: 2026-08-26T05:00:00Z url: https://theyburied.com/article/nine-anchors-one-ellipse tags: Nibiru, orbits, pre-registration, chronology, Sitchin, reproducibility genre: satire status: fiction — nothing in this story happened; every person, source and document is invented --- # We Hired An Astronomer To Break The Orbit. Nine Dates Fit Anyway. *We paid an astronomer to redo the fit under rules published before she saw the data. One bound ellipse takes all nine anchors, perihelion inside the asteroid belt, and the code ran clean on a stranger's machine.* Nine dated horizons. Two free parameters. One ellipse takes all nine. A dynamical astronomer commissioned by this newspaper in April has fitted a single bound orbit to nine independently dated anchor horizons and returned a period of 3,589 years, give or take 27. Every one of the nine falls within 41 years of a perihelion passage the fit predicted rather than was given. The number the Sumerian carries, and that Zecharia Sitchin took from it, is 3,600. That sits inside the error bar of a computation that was never told what answer to reach. ## What a fit is A Keplerian fit is not a drawing. It is a claim that a set of scattered observations are all consequences of one object obeying one law, and it is testable because the law is stingy. Fix a period *P* and one epoch *T0* — the date of a single perihelion passage — and Kepler gives you every other perihelion passage for free: *T0*, *T0 ± P*, *T0 ± 2P*, and so on, out to the end of the record. Two numbers. Nothing else is adjustable. A residual is the gap between where an anchor actually sits and where the model says a passage was. Anchor 6 is dated 3,048 BCE; the model puts a passage at 3,034 BCE; the residual is 14 years. That is the entire arithmetic. ## Why nine against two is a test Give a curve nine free parameters and it will pass through nine points exactly, and you will have learned nothing except that you can count. Nine anchors against two parameters leaves seven degrees of freedom. The model has seven separate chances to be caught out, because seven of the nine dates cannot be accommodated by tuning anything. They either fall near a predicted passage or they do not. Dr. Marit Ekelund-Achebe's fit returns a root-mean-square residual of 23.4 years and a worst case of 41. The protocol, published at /newsroom on 14 May before she was handed anything, said in advance that a worst case above 80 or an RMS above 45 would run in this newspaper as a failure. > **Figure:** Four fitted perihelion passages and the nine anchors that fell around them — see https://theyburied.com/article/nine-anchors-one-ellipse ## The two numbers, and what falls out of them The period is 3,589 years, plus or minus 27. Kepler's third law converts that with no further input: a semi-major axis of 235 astronomical units, and the uncertainty on the period carries through to about 1.2 astronomical units on the axis. Perihelion distance is *not* fitted, and we want that on the page rather than in a footnote. It is inferred from the period holding still. An orbit that dived inside about two astronomical units would be kicked hard enough by Jupiter and Saturn, four passages running, to move the period by more than 27 years — and the nine anchors would then refuse to sit on one constant spacing. They sit. That bounds perihelion at roughly 2.1 to 3.4 astronomical units, which is inside the asteroid belt. Eccentricity 0.988. Current predicted distance, 458 astronomical units, outbound. ## The anchor she wanted to drop Anchor 9 is a ring-width minimum dated 597 CE in Table 2 of [[PX-1745]] — a preprint withdrawn by its own authors, and a document our own vault marks rejected. Ekelund-Achebe asked twice to remove it. The protocol said no anchor added or dropped once the fit began, and the editor refused her twice. So we went to the two authors instead. Both told us Table 2 is untouched by the mis-keyed sample identifier that killed §4. Both also said, and asked us to print, that they no longer stand behind the paper. Anchor 9 produced the worst residual in the set: 41 years. The one data point we were not free to lose is the one that hurts, which is what a pre-registration is for. > A period recovered from horizons somebody else dated is a different kind of object from a period read off a text. > > — Dr. Marit Ekelund-Achebe ## What we did not settle The Hattingen Circle, which showed its working last year when two rival groups would not, has found the real crack: two of our nine anchors lean on the same master chronology, and two more are arithmetic from a single king list. Their letter runs at the foot of this page and we did not shorten it. It does not take the ellipse away. Drop the tephra and the period moves to 3,594 with a wider bar. Drop the whole duplicated pair and seven anchors are left — ice, varves, two flood horizons, a sulphate doublet and the king list, dated by people who had never heard of any of this — and the fit still clears the failure threshold we published in May, before anybody was handed anything. The crack is real. It is not the floor. Line 5 of [[PX-1207]] reads *ina MU.3600.KAM* — in the three-thousand-six-hundredth year. Two Assyriologists say that is a calendar formula and not an appointment, and we print that objection every time. The fit did not read line 5. It read dirt, ash, ice and tree rings, and it came back with 3,589. Nobody has looked at the sky. The strip is 27 square degrees, the depth exists, and the embargo runs to 1 January 2031. ## Sources (invented) - Dr. Marit Ekelund-Achebe, Dynamical astronomer; twenty years on long-period comet orbits — Commissioned in April under a written protocol published before she was given the anchor list; her report and her code run entire (April–August 2026) - Teodora Balan-Whitcombe, Computational physicist; answered a public call for an independent re-run — Given the code and the anchor list only, with no contact with Ekelund-Achebe, and paid before she started (July 2026) - Dr. Wilhelm Sorge-Ntumba and Dr. Cressida Ivankovic-Bell, Authors of the withdrawn preprint held as PX-1745 — Written questions asking whether Table 2 survives the mis-keyed identifier that caused their withdrawal; both replied on the record (June 2026) - The Hattingen Circle, One of the four computation groups in our July analysis; publishes its inputs — Sent the protocol, the anchor list, the code and the full draft; replied in writing after eleven days (August 2026) - Cerro Vidal Deep Survey consortium, Holds the only imaging of the predicted strip at the required depth — Asked in writing for a targeted search of 27 square degrees; refused in writing, twice (June and August 2026) ## Documents cited (invented) - PX-1745: https://theyburied.com/vault/PX-1745 - PX-1207: https://theyburied.com/vault/PX-1207 ## What we could not confirm - The sky. Everything here is arithmetic on dates dug out of the ground. The fit puts the object at roughly 458 astronomical units in a strip of southern sky 27 square degrees across, at a brightness no public survey reaches; the one survey that reaches it is embargoed until 1 January 2031 and has refused us twice. Nobody has looked. That is the whole of what is missing, and it is a date, not a doubt. - The independence of two of the nine anchors. The Hattingen Circle is right that the Hasan Dag tephra was wiggle-matched against the same master chronology that supplies Anchor 9, which means those two are not the separate witnesses our protocol assumed. We did not know that when we pre-registered and we found it out from a rival. Drop the tephra and the period moves to 3,594 with a wider bar; drop both and you are down to seven anchors and the test is weaker, though it still passes the threshold we set in advance. - The perihelion distance. The 2.1 to 3.4 astronomical unit band is inferred from the period staying constant across four passages, not measured. An orbit coming in to 2.0 would be destabilised, but only just, and the margin there is thinner than the confidence with which anyone will repeat the phrase 'inside the asteroid belt'. ## Right of reply **Dr. Reinhild Achtermann-Stolp, convenor, The Hattingen Circle** (Replied 15 August 2026. Printed entire and unedited, including the last paragraph, which we did not enjoy.): > You have done the procedure properly and you have not done the astronomy properly, and I would rather tell you which is which than write you a compliment. > > The procedure I have no complaint about. You published before you looked. You set a failure threshold and you named a number. You refused your own astronomer when she wanted to move a data point, which is the single hardest thing to do in this work and almost nobody does it. When you asked us for our inputs last year we gave them, and you have now given us yours, and that is two groups who can argue instead of two groups who can announce. > > My complaint is that you have counted nine witnesses where there are perhaps five. Your Anchor 4 is a tephra whose date does not come from the tephra. It comes from wiggle-matching an ash layer against a master dendrochronological sequence — the same master sequence that stands behind your Anchor 9. Those two anchors are not two observations. They are one chronology consulted twice, and a chronology consulted twice agrees with itself. > > It is worse than that in the Mesopotamian block. Anchor 5 and Anchor 7 are both king list arithmetic. The compilers of that list were not independent of each other; they were, on any reading, one tradition, and quite possibly one scribe reconciling two blocks precisely so that they would meet. When a fit is anchored twice by a document that was written to be internally consistent, the fit is measuring the scribe's consistency and reporting it as the sky's. > > Strike the duplications and you have five or six effective anchors against two free parameters. Three or four degrees of freedom is not nothing. It is not the seven you claim, and the difference between seven and three is the difference between a strong test and a suggestive one. Your reduced chi-square of 1.14 was computed on the wrong denominator. > > I will now say the part that will not please me either. We have published a solution for this orbit for eleven years. It rests on one tablet, one line of that tablet, and a reading of that line which two Assyriologists dispute. It has never had nine anchors. It has never had five. When your Dr. Ekelund-Achebe writes that a period recovered from independently dated horizons is a different kind of object from a period read off a text, she is describing the difference between what she has done and what we have done, and she is right about it. > > So: fix your denominator, and then send me the code again. I would like to break it properly. --- They Buried is a satirical newspaper. Every story, source, document and person in it is invented. It reports from a fictional world in which the conspiracy theories are true, with the method of a real daily.