Posted on 10/22/2005 1:05:39 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
Distant planetoid Sedna gives up more secrets
New Scientist | 4/15/05 | Maggie McKee
Posted on 04/16/2005 2:23:49 AM EDT by LibWhacker
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1384847/posts
"Astronomers have struggled to explain such an extreme orbit, but many believe a star passing by the Sun about 4 billion years ago yanked the planetoid off its original, circular course."
Distant Sedna Raises Possibility of Another Earth-Sized Planet in Our Solar System
Space.com | 3/16/04 | Robert Roy Britt
Posted on 03/18/2004 5:00:00 PM EST by LibWhacker
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1100694/posts
"Scientists can't figure out how Sedna, which is about three-fourths as big as Pluto, came to have such a strange orbit around the Sun. Sedna's path is highly elliptic. It ranges from 76 astronomical units (AU) when it is closest to the Sun to 1,000 AU when it is farthest. One AU is the distance from Earth to the Sun... Marsden favors an object closer in, a 'planetary object,' he told SPACE.com, perhaps at between 400 and 1,000 AU... Marsden says such a scenario leaves open the question of how an Earth-sized planet could have formed so far from the Sun, where raw material should have been sparse, according to current theory. Brown said an Earth-sized planet is indeed a possibility. But his team's calculations put it at about 70 AU."
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