Okay, I'm bowing out of this one. I'm not a scientist, news about this sucka keeps coming in, and I have nothing but theories that could be blown apart with the next bulletin.

The Soho pic shows it like the underside of a Palm Beach ballot with a dimpled chad and a halo around it. If the chad is our planet, the halo may be a shock wave in the Oort cloud, and the thing is knocking comets out of the cloud of stuff that's ordinarily too small to coalesce into anything dangerous.

And, if it's indeed our Sun's dark twin, orders of magnitude more massive than Jupiter, then whenever and wherever it nears Earth, we shall feel it. Bigtime.

We still need to learn its angle to the plane of the ecliptic, for that determines the duration of the two windows of destruction: first as it approaches, then as it leaves. And its mass, of course...which can be derived from its rate of acceleration.

It does seem clear that something on this kind of path would not cause the same waste of our planet each time it passes nearby. If we were on the near side of the Sun when it closes and the far side when it leaves the damage to us would be minimal. If "minimal" is an appropriate term.

Every 26,000 years, eh? Sounds close to the great wheel of the Zodiac. Till we get more hard data, I'm betting on an arrival time of 2013, the year the Mayan calendar stops.

Meanwhile, we already have a situation here. Chandler's Wobble is misbehaving, triggering more quakes. Are we being taught a lesson about the fleetingness of matter and the forever of spirit?

In wonder,
Oliver