New Planetoid Seen in Our Solar System
WASHINGTON (March 15) - 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.