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Sedna is a red, trans-Neptunian object discovered in 2003, estimated to be half the size of Pluto. Its highly elliptical orbit takes 12,000 years to orbit the Sun, and it is named after an Inuit goddess. Sedna’s classification as a Kuiper belt or inner Oort cloud object is debated.
Sedna, formally called 90377 Sedna, is a newly discovered planetary body estimated to be about half the size of Pluto. It takes about 12,000 years to make one full orbit around the Sun and is classified as a trans-Neptunian object, like Pluto. It is a red planet, almost as red as Mars, and at the time of its discovery it was the most distant planetoid in the solar system. Sedna was discovered in late 2003 at the Palomar Observatory, near San Diego, California. Since then, several other objects of similar size and distance from the sun have also been detected, including the planetoid Xena, which is likely larger than Pluto.
Sedna’s orbit is highly elliptical, like most of the outer bodies of the solar system. At its farthest location, Sedna is estimated to be nearly a thousand times as distant from the Sun as Earth is. At its closest point, it is only about 76 times as distant. The existence of Sedna and similar objects has led scientists to believe that there could be dozens of other objects of the same size, perhaps even some as large as Mars. The gravitational influence of the Sun extends out to a couple of light-years, leaving an immense amount of space for hard-to-detect planetoids with gigantic orbits.
Sedna is named after an Inuit goddess who is said to have lived at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean. The name is meant to capture the cold and darkness of this very distant celestial body. In the closest leg of its orbit, the Sun would appear dim, but still like the brightest star in the sky, and in the most distant leg, it would appear to be barely distinguishable from other bright stars.
There is some disagreement as to whether Sedna is a Kuiper belt object or an inner Oort cloud object. The Kuiper belt is usually defined as a set of objects extending from the orbit of Neptune to about 50 distances from the Earth to the Sun. The orbits of these objects are largely determined by the gravitational influence of Neptune and Jupiter, but Sedna it is farther away, only about 76 Earth distances to its closest point, forcing most scientists to group it with the Oort cloud, which consists of bodies with more eccentric orbits and greater distances.
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