March 15, 2004

Sedna Signals Something Sour

Sedna is a newly discovered planetoid approximately 2/3 the size of Pluto and which travels around the sun every 10,000 plus years. It sits in the Kuiper Belt.

Sedna's discovery announcement was made on March 14, 2004 (actual discovery on November 14, 2003) has been confirmed by several telescopes around the world.

According to Mke Brown (California Institute of Technology in Pasadena), Sedna resembles objects predicted to lie in the hypothetical Oort Cloud, which is believed to be a zone of early comets that extends around the sun halfway to the nearest star.

And for more information go to http://www.spitzer.caltech.edu/

Very cool stuff. In fact, this body may even have it's own moon.

More fascinating is the added discussions to Pluto's planetary status. From a previous article:

Stern, who is also the principal investigator of NASA's New Horizons Mission, which will send a spacecraft to study Pluto and other Kuiper belt objects, suggests that the solar system is full of "planets," including Pluto and hundreds of other Kuiper belt objects.

"A reasonable estimate is that there are about 900 planets. All but eight of them are out there [in the Kuiper belt]," he said.

Update: Just read this on the NASA Site:

"Brown, along with Drs. Chad Trujillo of the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii and David Rabinowitz of Yale University, New Haven, Conn., found the "planetoid" on November 14, 2003, using the 48-inch Samuel Oschin Telescope at Caltech's Palomar Observatory near San Diego. Within days, the object was observed by telescopes in Chile, Spain, Arizona and Hawaii, and soon after, NASA's new Spitzer Space Telescope looked for it."

Posted by LPH at March 15, 2004 07:39 PM | TrackBack