Planet-Like Body Discovered at Fringes of Our Solar System

Planet-Like Body Discovered at Fringes of Our Solar System	03.15.04
What's bigger than an asteroid, smaller than a planet, red all over and far, far away? The answer -- a mysterious planet-like body orbiting our Sun -- has been discovered by NASA-funded researchers led by an astronomer at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif.

The object is three times farther away from Earth than Pluto, making it the most distant known in the solar system.

"The Sun appears so small from that distance that you could completely block it out with the head of a pin," said Dr. Mike Brown, Caltech associate professor of planetary astronomy and leader of the research team. The object, unofficially named "Sedna," is 13 billion kilometers (8 billion miles) away from Earth.

This is likely the first detection of the long-hypothesized "Oort cloud," a faraway repository of small icy bodies that supplies the comets that streak by Earth.
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More about Sedna at NASA web site. - LRK -