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The Sun's 10th Planet... Sedna?

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the well-that-remains-to-be-seen dept.

dsanfte writes "While NASA remains intentionally vague, promising only a news conference Monday, The Australian has the details. The new planet, dubbed Sedna after the Inuit goddess of the sea, is 3 billion km further from the sun than Pluto, and is slightly smaller at 2000km in diameter. This discovery has apparently reignited the debate as to how big a solar object must be in order to qualify as a 'planet', but it is significant nonetheless."

9 of 636 comments (clear)

  1. A lot of astronomers don't want to count Pluto by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    So why should we start counting an even smaller "planet"? Pluto gets grandfathered in, and that's it.

  2. I wonder what is so important.... by dealsites · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I wonder what is so important that NASA is going to wait until Monday. Maybe they will be unveiling something else at the same time?

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    1. Re:I wonder what is so important.... by AnamanFan · · Score: 5, Interesting

      It's a standard rule of Public Relations. Never announce anything between Friday at 4pm till Monday at 8am.

      The reason being that news outlets are not at full capacity during the weekends, so any news announced over the weekend won't get as much coverage. If NASA announced the news today, it will be covered on the Sunday evening news, and never again since that piece of news was already done, even when not many saw it.

      You can notice this practice when someone famous dies over a weekend. There will be an immediate announcement saying that the person is missing or very ill or something of the sort, then make the announcement on Monday.

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  3. What happened to the naming convetion? by Snowspinner · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I thought planets were Roman gods. It's not even like we've run out of them. We can still find Vulcan (Mulciber if you want to avoid rabit Trekkies), Juno, Minerva, Apollo (You can call this one Phoebus if you want to avoid confusing it with space probes), Diana, Vesta.

    And that's before you start getting slightly obscure ones like Janus, Bacchus (Or Liber), Fanus, Quirinus, Pomona, or Vertumnus.

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    1. Re:What happened to the naming convetion? by Sqwubbsy · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Wasn't 'Apollo' considered the sun. Remember, this wasn't just a 'naming convention' but actual mythology. Apollo drove the chariot of the sun across the sky. Mars, the god of war, appeared in certain places at certain times, same with Venus.
      Now that Roman mythology isn't really considered religion (outside of Berkeley) it can be a nice tradition. I mean, it's not lik the Inuit have really contributed to Western Culture except for, I guess, hockey and lacrosse.

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  4. There could be a lot of stuff out there by mbone · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Out in the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud there are thought to be as many as one trillion objects - most small 1 to 10 km chucks of ice.

    The really interesting question is, what is the mass distribution ? (I.e., how does the number of objects scale with their mass ?) This is basically unconstrained by real data. All such cosmic mass distributions are steep, but many (for example, planets in the Solar System, Asteroids in the Asteroid belt) are dominated by the most massive bodies.

    If this holds true in the Oort cloud, in particular, there could be some pretty big objects. Even a Jupiter sized object might be able to hide from the Infrared surveys (the best way of detecting such an object).

  5. Re:Woop de fucking do! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Yeah, it'll probably cost a lot to reprint all the New Age ancient traditions to include a tenth planet.

    Ten Planets? You haven't been keeping up with here astrology has been going the last twenty-fove years. I know astrologers who use twenty planets, most of which are imaginary. [ Dutch School of Astrology. Germans School of Astrology. The Planets of Alice Bailey, and related flakes.]

    This, of course, ignores the two hundred or so asteroids which new age astrologers use. And don't forget the plethora of comets, meteor showers, deep space objects, and other things that may, or may not exist.

    And to be sure that you haven't forgotten anything, there are umpteen "Arabic Parts", Midpoints, Orbs, harmonics, ( or something like that) etc.

    In short, roughly 10^8 objects that no self-respecting astrologer would omit, if one believes in the validity of all the books on astrology that have been published.

  6. Re:Woop de fucking do! by cybermace5 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Wanna know what will REALLY give the conspiracy theorists, New Age freaks, etc? "Sedna" is "Andes" spelled backwards! Everyone knows the advanced Inca civilization lived in the Andes mountains, and there are more than enough wacky theories about the Incas involving aliens and whatnot. Oooh...why is an Inuit god named after backwards-Andes...are the Inuits actually Inca refugees? They're close the Pole, too, and there are already crazy theories about a hole to the interior of the earth where advanced civilizations live, and the Eskimos are somehow related....

    Yeah, can't imagine a worse name, really. Backwards-spelled stuff is pure gold in the conspiracy community.

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  7. Here, a rule that I propose.. planet versus other: by deathcow · · Score: 5, Interesting


    If it's big enough to assume spherical shape by the action of gravity, it's a planet.