New Distant 'Planetoid' Seen in Our Solar System
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A newly discovered dark and frigid world, a bit smaller than Pluto and three times farther away, has emerged as the most distant object in the solar system, astronomers said on Monday.
The new "planetoid," named Sedna after an Inuit goddess who created the sea creatures of the Arctic, is by far the coldest and most distant object known to orbit the sun, a team of researchers announced.
At more than 8 billion miles from the sun, the temperature on Sedna never gets above minus 400 degrees Fahrenheit.
"The sun appears so small from that distance that you could completely block it out with the head of a pin," said Mike Brown, an astronomer at California Institute of Technology, who led the research team.
First detected on Nov. 14 with the Samuel Oschin Telescope near San Diego, California, Sedna was observed within days on telescopes from Chile to Spain, Arizona and Hawaii.
NASA (news - web sites)'s new orbiting Spitzer Space Telescope, which looks at the universe with infrared detectors that peer through cosmic dust, was also trained on the distant object.
The Spitzer scope found that Sedna probably has about three-fourths the diameter of Pluto, which would make it the biggest object found in the solar system since Pluto's discovery in 1930.
For further info: <<http://www.gps.caltech.edu/~mbrown/sedna/>>
[Nice graphics and everything.]
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