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March 15, 2004 Pasadena, California - The first sight of a mysterious object moving slowly like a planet at the outer edges of our solar system was on November 14, 2003. The discoverers were astronomers Michael Brown at the California Institute of Technology and his colleagues, Chad Trujillo of the Gemini Observatory in Hawaii, and David Rabinowitz at Yale University. They have been working together on a NASA-sponsored project, Near Earth Asteroid Tracking (NEAT). The team contacted other astronomers who began to look for the object first labeled "2003 VB12" and is now unofficially dubbed "Sedna," the name of an Inuit woman in the Arctic who was thrown from a kayak by her frightened father. Her fingers became the sea creatures. Sedna is definitely a cold place, probably the coldest object in our solar system, with temperatures never rising above MINUS 400 degrees Fahrenheit.
Ironically, as cold as it is, Sedna is red hot and shiny to look at through high-powered telescopes like the orbiting Spitzer Space Telescope. The astronomy team says that the only other object so red in our solar system is Mars. What would make such an intense red? "Probably all its ice," says astronomer Brian Marsden, Director of the Minor Planet Center at the Harvard Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Dr. Marsden helped this week to calculate the orbit of 2003 VB12/Sedna. He has also been at the forefront of the astronomical controversy about whether or not Pluto should still be called the ninth planet, or be reduced to the category of an icy planetoid - or "Plutino," a recent new category applied to our solar system based. There are a lot of Plutinos and they are all icy and smaller than Pluto.
So, in fairness to Pluto, Dr. Marsden does not think the newly discovered icy body at the edge of the solar system on the outskirts of the Kuiper Belt should be considered a tenth planet. In fact, what exactly it is and how it got to be where it is in such a radically eccentric orbit has Dr. Marsden and all the other astronomers baffled.
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