Editor’s Note: the following article on Sedna, written by Eric Francis, was originally published on March 19, 2004 and is now part of the Planet Waves archives, only available through a subscription to Planet Waves Astrology News. Friday marked the fifth anniversary of Sedna’s discovery. Part I of this article was published on Saturday. –RA
Astronomically, Sedna resides somewhere called the inner Oort cloud, the existence of which is not yet fully agreed upon by scientists and where the New York Times does not have a bureau. Most of the little planets beyond Neptune belong to something called the Kuiper Belt, which is a swarm of icy planetoids on the far reaches of the solar system (these are the Plutinos and the Cubewanos). Pluto is the king of this realm. All the discussion you may be hearing about “whether Pluto is really a planet” has to do with the fact that Pluto is really a Kuiper object, the first ever sighted, and there are some people who feel that calling it a planet was incorrect.
There’s a precedent for demotion: Ceres, discovered in 1801, was originally called a planet and was then reclassified as an asteroid, which was probably a mistake that may be reversed soon. For Scorpios in the audience worried that your planet is going to get demoted, fear not: from an astrological standpoint, this notion is an absurdity. Pluto is Pluto and evermore shall be so. If one pending scientific proposal is approved, Ceres, Varuna and Quaoar will be promoted to official planet status rather than Pluto being demoted. This will be fun because it will send tons of astrologers scrambling to catch up with what’s already a very interesting and available field of study today. But it’s also purely academic. What astronomers define nine or 12 of a quarter million bodies to be seems like a lot of wasted bandwidth. They are all planets if you ask me.
The fact that Pluto is so influential suggests (or might reasonably suggest) to astrologers that there’s more information waiting in its region of space. But in fact, exceedingly few astrologers bother with anything beyond Pluto, and by exceedingly few, I would take a guess and say there are maybe 20 in the world who could do a chart session really factoring in these points in a meaningful way. That’s about on par with how many professional astronomers are involved with this kind of research as well; lots of planets, few people interested.
The Oort Cloud, where Sedna lives, is the next swarm of stuff out beyond the Kuiper Belt, and extends halfway to the nearest star. The Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud are the realms from which comets and centaur planets are drawn into the inner solar system, like a reservoir of ancient space material from the earliest days of the solar system. All of those little planets, probably millions or billions of them, are held into place by the Sun’s gravity. But from the viewpoint of Sedna, the Sun could be covered with the head of a pin at arm’s length. It would look like a large, bright star. You could not do much sunbathing there; the temperature is about 400 degrees below zero. Not exactly Rio Rancho.