Posted on Friday 19 January 2007 to unknown
As
the legend goes, Sedna was a beautiful Inuit girl who lived with her
father. She was very vain and thought she was too beautiful to marry
just anyone. Time and time again she turned down hunters who came to
her camp wishing to marry her. Finally one day her father said to her
"Sedna, we have no food and we will go hungry soon. You need a husband
to take care of you, so the next hunter who comes to ask your hand in
marriage, you must marry him." Sedna ignored her father and kept
brushing her hair as she looked at her reflection in the water.
Soon
her father saw another hunter approaching their camp. The man was
dressed elegantly in furs and appeared to be well-to-do even though his
face was hidden. Sedna's father spoke to the man. "If you wish to seek
a wife I have a beautiful daughter . She can cook and sew and I know
she will make a good wife." Under great protest, Sedna was placed
aboard of the hunters kayak and journeyed to her new home. Soon they
arrived at an island. Sedna looked around. She could see nothing. No
sod hut, no tent, just bare rocks and a cliff. The hunter stood before
Sedna and as he pulled down his hood, he let out and evil laugh.
Sedna's husband was not a man as she had thought but a raven in
disguise. She screamed and tried to run, but the bird dragged her to a
clearing on the cliff. Sedna's new home was a few tufts of animal hair
and feathers strewn about on the hard, cold rock. The only food she had
to eat was fish. Her husband, the raven, brought raw fish to her after
a day of flying off in search of food.
The
big black raven swooped down upon the kayak bobbing on the ocean.
Sedna's father took his paddle and struck at the raven but missed as
the bird continued to harass them. Finally the raven swooped down near
the kayak and flapped his wing upon the ocean. A vicious storm began to
brew. The calm arctic ocean soon became a raging torrent tossing the
tiny kayak to and fro. Sedna's father became very frightened. He
grabbed Sedna and threw her over the side of the kayak into the ocean.
"Here, he screamed, here is your precious wife, please do not hurt me,
take her."
In late 2003, an object made of rock and ice and two thirds the size of the planet Pluto was found orbiting the Sun. With an orbit more than three times that of the Pluto, it is the coldest and most distant body yet found in the Solar System. It has been named after Sedna, the Inuit sea goddess. While it share many characteristics in common with other objects that have been recently found in the Kuiper Belt, it is distinguished by being nearly as red as Mars and having a very low rate of rotation. This slow rotation is lower than expected for a planetoid of Sedna's size and suggests that it might even have a moon.
The interesting thing is that it's not a Kuiper belt object - its perihelion is well outside the Kuiper belt. It's been described as an inner Oort cloud object, which is rather exciting as until now the Oort has been entirely hypothetical.Tim links to a fascinating discussion by Sedna's discoverers with lots of interesting images and diagrams as well as this zooming-out animation which gives a very good idea of the scale of Sedna's orbit.