Sedna: Part I

Editor’s Note:В 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 II of this article will be published at 6 pm EST on Sunday. –RA

So where were we? Ah yes, I was doing a little investigative reporting in the dairy aisle at Vashon Island Thriftway when I uncovered the following story.

THIS JUST IN: NATURE STILL EXISTS

For some reason, our local supermarket carries a lot of goat products; this is how the Northwest gets its reputation for being so groovy. Goat yogurt. Imagine all those mellow Northwestern farm women in their Birkenstock clogs milking little mischievous grey critters, in places like downtown Seattle, which of course you see every day.

Stuck to that particular shelf was a hand-written note that said:

Goatmilk Products

Shoppers: it’s once again birthing season for goats + supply is greatly limited – sorry – Vashon Tway.

I cannot tell you how relieved I was to see that the natural order of reality had some bearing on the human experience.

As cosmic coincidence would have it, that was the same day the discovery of Sedna was announced by astronomers at Cal Tech. It was seen using the Spitzer Space Telescope, which among its tricks peers into space by way of a camera. Most planetary discoveries are not made by gazing at the stars in the backyard sense of the word but rather by studying photographs. The discovery was made in a plate taken by Mike Brown and Chad Trujillo on Nov. 14, 2003, but due to the need to confirm the discovery, the announcement was delayed five months.

Given that the minor planet count presently stands at 243,682 (bodies orbiting our Sun), and you hardly ever hear about any of those, there’s a pretty big deal being made about Sedna; it’s made all major media and there are many articles that appear in searches.

Sedna is something unusual even on the scale of all those minor planets. It’s very nearly the size of Pluto, and thus the biggest planetary discovery since Pluto, in 1930. It is believed to have a Moon, though the evidence is indirect. It is the reddest thing discovered since Mars.

And its orbit is about 10,500 years — though not quite the longest known. That distinction currently belongs to 2000 OO67, which goes around our Sun in 11,670 years, and which was discovered in the summer of 2000. As the Cal Tech website put it, however, “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 three times further than Pluto, the most distant known planet.”

Its orbit is extremely egg-shaped, and it’s currently near the Sun. At its furthest, Sedna travels more than 800 times the distance from Earth to the Sun. It goes WAY out there, and comes back with messages and information from the deep subconscious.

Sedna is between 1,250 and 1,800 kilometers in diameter, bigger than Quaoar, another major discovery in which Brown and Trujillo were involved. Quaoar was designated minor planet 50,000 in 2002.

The combination of Sedna being the largest thing since Pluto, the most distant object sighted, the length of its orbit and the fact that its discoverers broke the rules of naming a planet, have collectively gotten this thing a lot of attention. Specifically, the rule they broke was that the International Astronomical Union (IAU) doesn’t normally entertain naming proposals ’til a planet has been assigned a catalogue number. It’s been provisionally designated 2003 VB12 but has not yet been catalogued formally.

But the discoverers will get the opportunity to name it once all the orbit is confirmed and the paperwork is filed, and obviously the name is going to stick. It has already become part of our culture.

There are a lot of themes to cover relating to this discovery and how we relate it to astrology. If you’re wondering where this planet is in the sky right now, it’s at 18 degrees of Taurus. In our lifetimes, it has only been in Aries in Taurus. Interesting that it was conjunct Chiron in early Taurus (within two degrees) at the time of Chiron’s discovery, and as such can be counted as part of the ‘rainbow bridge’ reality that Chiron represents.

The name comes from the Inuit goddess of the sea. The Inuits, formerly called the Eskimos, hold her as a goddess of abundance in that she’s directly involved with the bounty of the hunt. She is depicted as a morph between a woman and a seal. She lives, in the myth, at the bottom of the Arctic Sea. You can see an image of Sedna and an artist’s conception of the planet here, where there are also lots of clear illustrations showing the orbit, the relative size and much more:

http://www.gps.caltech.edu/~mbrown/sedna/