posted March 15, 2004 07:19 AM              

*edit*

Gah! AJ beat me to it

*edit again*

Oh, wait...maybe not...looks like something completely different.

HEY, AJ - Wanna share the Geek Crown?

*edit...again*

D'oh! I guess I should post some of the article...:

LOS ANGELES (AP) - It is a frozen world more than 8 billion miles from Earth and believed to be the farthest known object within our solar system.

NASA planned a Monday press conference to offer more details about Sedna, a planetoid between 800 miles and 1,100 miles in diameter, or about three-quarters the size of Pluto.

Named for the Inuit goddess who created the sea creatures of the Arctic, Sedna lies more than three times farther from the sun than Pluto. It was discovered in November.

(...)

That makes Sedna the largest object found orbiting the sun since the discovery of Pluto, the ninth planet, in 1930. It trumps in size another world, called Quaoar, discovered by the same team in 2002.

(...)

Sedna follows a highly elliptical path around the sun, a circuit that it takes 10,500 years to complete. Its orbit loops out as far as 84 billion miles from the sun, or 900 times the distance between the Earth and our star.