Sedna still a mystery 1 year after its discovery

[pmbryant]

(Borrowing from my own headline for the Pluto article I posted earlier.)

From the Washington Post: Feb 14 2005

Distant Object Could Hold Secrets to Earth's Past

By Guy Gugliotta
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 14, 2005; Page A06

When the icy red world called Sedna edged into the solar system from the shadows of deep space, astronomers marveled at its unexpected arrival even as they wondered at its origins. Where did it come from? And why was it there?

A year after its public debut, Sedna remains an enigma in search of an explanation.

It is the most distant object in the solar system ever identified -- traveling around the sun every 10,500 years in a highly elliptical orbit that keeps it 7 billion to 93 billion miles from Earth. Nothing else that far out has ever been seen.

All the planets in the solar system orbit the sun in a circle. Not Sedna. All the planets orbit in the same plane. Sedna's orbit is canted 12 degrees.

<<PMBryant: Ack. Poor science writing here. Not all planets orbit in a circle, and not all planets orbit in precisely the same plane. Sedna's orbit is, however, far more elliptical than any other planet's. Its orbital tilt is also extreme, though not to the same degree.>>

All the planetoids and comets that orbit in deep space just beyond Pluto were probably hurled there by Neptune's gravity. Sedna is too far away for that.

Unlocking Sedna's secrets has important implications for scientists' understanding of Earth's origins, for whatever happened to Sedna must have happened 4.5 billion years ago as the infant sun's "dust disk" created the solar system. Sedna is a visitor from the beginning of time.

...

Astronomers led by Michael Brown of the California Institute of Technology announced the discovery of Sedna last March. It is a small, spherical, body 800 to 1,100 miles in diameter, about one-seventh the size of Earth, and colored bright red -- redder than anything in the solar system except Mars. The team named the discovery Sedna, after the Inuit goddess of the sea.

...

More: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A21549-2005Feb13.html

[cdb]

1. Red??

A red object?? Another one? Oh no! Do we have to recount the votes there as well???

[Spinzonner]

2. Does it have a monolith ?

[Dhalgren]

3. It is the home planet of the Annunaki...

[htuttle]

4. Cool orbital schematics I found

I was wondering about the answer to the question, "Is that inside, or outside, the Oort cloud?"

Answer: It stays inside the Oort cloud by a long shot.