This little tidbit of science news is pretty cool. The science community welcomes the discovery of the 10th potential "planet" (depending on one's definition of "planet") Sedna, named after the Inuit goddess of the sea.
Sedna's highly elliptical orbit puts it roughly 2-3 times further away from the Sun than Pluto, which translates to about 70-90 times further away than Earth's. Sedna takes 10,500 Earth years to orbit the Sun once.
The issue at hand regarding Sedna's classification is whether or not it should be considered a planet. We were always taught that the Solar System consisted of the Sun, nine planets, an asteroid belt between Earth and Mars, and some comets. However, in recent history, new discoveries have been made, including the Kuiper Belt (an asteroid belt beyond the orbit of Neptune, the 8th original planet) and Quaoar (a nearly-Pluto-sized object in the Kuiper Belt). Pluto's orbit travels right through Kuiper, so some astronomers no longer regard Pluto as a planet: merely the largest object to be found in the Kuiper Belt. The argument is that Quaoar and Pluto have no actual physical dissimilarities, just historical ones. The same goes for Sedna. It's orbit most likely passes through the Oort cloud (cloud of dust and unorbiting comets at the far reaches of the Solar System. Leftovers that were not used up during the birth of our Sun and planets.) and should be classified as nothing more than a massive Oort Cloud object.
Sedna's erratic orbit varies even more than Pluto's elliptical orbit (all other planets have a roughly circular orbit in comparison) which hints at the presence of a much more massive planetary body in close orbit. Apparently, a Mars-sized planet would do the trick, but that has yet to be discovered. Another possibly is that Sedna, being so far from the Sun, is actually affected by the gravitational pull of neighboring stars. Either way, it's pretty interesting and I'm done rambling now. Sorry, I had a geek moment and had to share this information with you all!
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