The Change Mariner

Sedna: The 10th Planet?

CNN.com:

Scientists may have discovered the solar system's most distant object, more than three times farther away from Earth than Pluto. "The sun appears so small from that distance that you could completely block it out with the head of a pin," said Dr. Mike Brown of the California Institute of Technology, who helped in the discovery.

The object -- about 8 billion miles (12.8 billion kilometers) from Earth -- has been given the provisional name of Sedna, after the Inuit goddess who created sea creatures of the Arctic.

Brown and his team of astronomers, using Caltech's Palomar Observatory, found Sedna in November as part of an ongoing three-year outer solar system project. Days later, the high power Spitzer Space Telescope focused on the object.

Posted by Bob King at March 15, 2004 12:31 PM | TrackBack
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