Artist's conception of the cold distant Sedna. The sun (at upper right) is a tiny point of light 8 billion miles away from the red planetoid. A hypothesized tiny moon appears nearby. Sedna is the coldest, most distant place known in the solar system; possibly the first object in the long-hypothesized Oort cloud.

On 15 March 2004, astronomers from Caltech, Gemini Observatory, and Yale University announced the discovery of the coldest, most distant object known to orbit the sun. The object was found at a distance 90 times greater than that from the sun to the earth -- about 3 times further than Pluto, the most distant known planet.

The discovery was made on the Samuel Oschin Telescope at the Palomar Observatory east of San Diego on 14 November 2003 by the team of Mike Brown (Caltech), Chad Trujillo (Gemini Observatory) and David Rabinowitz (Yale).

Because of its frigid temperatures, the team has proposed that the object be named in honor of Sedna, the Inuit goddess of the sea from whom all sea creatures were created. Officially, the object is currently known to astronomers as 2003 VB12, based on the day of its discovery.

Image courtesy of Michael Brown.