Sedna's Orbit
1 2016-04-05T10:08:04+00:00 Brock Earth Sciences 443498efbb7251f48d0d638e5c57b8774f100004 14 1 These four panels show the location of the newly discovered planet-like object, dubbed "Sedna," which lies in the farthest reaches of our Solar System. Each panel, moving counterclockwise from the upper left, successively zooms out to place Sedna in context. The first panel shows the orbits of the inner planets, including Earth, and the asteroid belt that lies between Mars and Jupiter. In the second panel, Sedna is shown well outside the orbits of the outer planets and the more distant Kuiper Belt objects. Sedna's full orbit is illustrated in the third panel along with the object's current location. Sedna is nearing its closest approach to the Sun; its 10,000-year orbit typically takes it to far greater distances. The final panel zooms out much farther, showing that even this large elliptical orbit falls inside what was previously thought to be the inner edge of the Oort cloud. The Oort cloud is a spherical distribution of cold, icy bodies lying at the limits of the Sun's gravitational pull. Sedna's presence suggests that this Oort cloud is much closer than scientists believed. *Image Credit*: NASA/JPL-Caltech/R. Hurt (SSC-Caltech) plain 2016-04-05T10:08:04+00:00 Internet Archive SPD-SLRSY-1504 image Where -- Stennis Space Center (SSC) What -- Sun What -- Jupiter What -- Mars What -- Earth What -- Sedna Planets Jet Propulsion Laboratory Solar System Exploration Brock Earth Sciences 443498efbb7251f48d0d638e5c57b8774f100004This page is referenced by:
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Beyond the Planets
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The solar system does not end at the outer orbits of the big planets. Pluto’s orbit carries it beyond the orbit of Neptune and Pluto is one of a number of objects that are thought to reside in the Kuiper Belt (alternative site), a doughnut-shaped ring, extending from about 30 to 50AUs. The New Horizons Mission is the only mission that has been designed to explore the Kuiper Belt, which is likely home to hundreds of thousands of icy bodies larger than 100 km across. The Kuiper Belt is also thought to contain an estimated trillion or more smaller icy bodies, which would become comets if they made there way into the inner solar system. Here is a depiction of what the Kuiper Belt looks like with respect to Sedna, a minor planet discovered in the outer reaches of the Solar system in 2003.
But don’t stop now, there is more. Beyond the Kuiper Belt lies a large cloud of other primarily icy bodies, called the Oort Cloud. This cloud is thought to extend to approximately 50,000 and 200,000 AU. We can abide by our convention of not presenting very large numbers if we switch units. That many AUs translates to between 0.8 and 3.2 light years. 3.2 lightyears is more than halfway to the nearest star, Alpha Centauri, which is 4.367 light years away from us. A proper scaled representation of our solar system, including the Oort cloud, looks something like this:
