What Is Planet Sedna?

The planet Sedna was discovered by a team of NASA-funded researchers at the California Institute of Technology. Initially, the object was named as 2003-VB12. A mysterious planet-like body three times farther from Earth than Pluto; the object was named as Sedna, after the Inuit goddess who is said to have created the sea creatures of the Arctic.

The planet was discovered on Nov. 14, 2003 and was later announced on March 15, 2004. It was discovered by the team comprising big names like David Rabinowitz, Chad Trujillo and Mike Brown. With ample assistance from NASA, they were able to make further discoveries about this planet.

It was revealed that, it takes Sedna 10,666 years to make an orbit around the Sun, which is forty times more than what it takes Pluto to do so. The planet Sedna is an object, in the Oort cloud, which is a region in space further away than the Kuiper Belt. The Oort cloud is said to have objects orbiting our own Sun that extend halfway out to the next star. So, the last time, Sedna was in the current position, we were witness to an ice age on earth.

It was considered to be a detached object in space, at the time of its discovery, which took place, as a survey was being conducted with the Samuel Oschin telescope at Palomar Observatory, situated near San Diego, California. Using the Yale's 160 megapixel Palomar Quest camera; the planet was observed on telescopes from Chile Spain and the USA.

It was basically, the fact, that it is a distant object, situated deep into space, that it was named Sedna after the undersea goddess at the North Pole. The most striking feature of Sedna is that, it is extremely far from the sun, in the coldest known region of our solar system. This is a place, where temperatures never rise above minus 240 degrees Celsius. Sedna is usually even colder, mainly because it is only briefly during its 10,500- year solar orbit, that it approaches the sun. Sedna has a highly elliptical axis and, at its most distant, Sedna is 130 billion kilometers from the sun, which is incidentally, 900 times Earth's solar distance.

The fact that even the Spitzer telescope was unable to detect the heat of the extremely distant, cold object, suggested to it, that, it must be less than 1,700 kilometers in diameter, which is much smaller than Pluto. With the help of the available data, it was estimated that, the size of Sedna was estimated to be between 800 to 1100 miles of diameter.

With the discovery of this planet, NASA has added another feather in its cap. It is amazing to see such rapid advancement in the field of space research.