Distant Worlds 

In a press conference at noon CST today, NASA will be presenting the discovery of a new KBO that may be almost as large as Pluto, and is the largest object found orbiting the Sun in 74 years. However, this blog is already annoyed by talk that the world, provisionally named Sedna, is the "10th planet," which we also went through over a year ago with Quaoar. Neither Sedna nor Quaoar are planets, and the any push to add them to the list will be more likely to change the number of planets in our solar system to eight than 10. The real controversy will come, however, if a KBO is ever discovered larger than Pluto, which Sedna's discovery makes seem entirely possible.

:: :: 09:33 :: David :: [permalink] ::