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2004-03-31, 01:40 AM | [Ignore Me] #1 | ||
Nasa is going to announce the detection in our solar system of a 10th 'planet' orbiting our sun. The discovery has been made using the Hubble Telescope and the Spitzer Space Telescope.
Sedna, as it has been named, is being described as "a mysterious object" and is being hailed as a "discovery of the most distant object ever detected orbiting the Sun". The object measures approximately 1,250 miles across but may yet prove to be even larger than Pluto, at 1,406 miles across. Its distance from Earth is 6.2 billion miles, residing in the distant Kuiper Belt. http://www.sky.com/skynews/article/0...014862,00.html |
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2004-03-31, 09:13 AM | [Ignore Me] #11 | |||
Lieutenant Colonel
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__________________
I love you, You love me, Lets go kill those dammn NC's With their jackhammer shotguns, And their Phoenix Missiles too, and make them wish they were barney's too. |
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2004-03-31, 12:35 PM | [Ignore Me] #14 | ||
Contributor Major
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It is very debatable whether this is a planet or not. As a matter of fact, Pluto is probably not even a planet and Sedna is quite smaller than Pluto. These planetoids are debris left over from the solar system formation. The fact that sedna is 2x the distance from the sun than pluto makes it clear that this object is a member of the Kuiper belt. When Pluto was discovered no one knew about the Oort cloud or the Kuiper belt and if they had, would not have classified Pluto as a planet. Of course the finding of a new planet would be sensational and draw in lots of money for NASA and the associated sciences. This is a good thing and the reason it may be classified as a planet even when there is no logical basis for scientifically doing so.
Planetoid is the right classification for Sedna. Studies of the Kuiper belt over the last decade have shown the emergence of this new class of objects. |
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