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.
Sedna was very unhappy
and miserable. She cried and cried and called her father's name.
Through the howling arctic winds Sedna's father could hear his
daughter's cries. He felt guilty for what he had done as he knew she
was sad. Sedna's father decided it was time to rescue his daughter. He
loaded up his kayak and paddled for days through the frigid arctic
waters to his Sedna's home. When he arrived Sedna was standing on the
shore. Sedna hugged her father then quickly climbed into his kayak and
paddled away. After many hours of travel Sedna turned and saw a black
speck far off into the distance. She felt the fear well up inside of
her for she knew the speck was her angry husband flying in search of
her.
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."
Sedna screamed and struggled as her body began go
numb in the icy arctic waters. She swam to the kayak and reached up,
her fingers grasping the side of the boat. Her father, terrified by the
raging storm, thought only of himself as he grabbed the paddle and
began to pound against Sedna's fingers. Sedna screamed for her father
to stop but to no avail. Her frozen fingers cracked and fell into the
ocean. Affected by her ghastly husbands powers, Sedna's fingers while
sinking to the bottom, turned into seals. Sedna attempted again to swim
and cling to her father's kayak. Again he grabbed the paddle and began
beating at her hands. Again Sedna's hands, frozen by the arctic sea
again cracked off. The stumps began to drift to the bottom of the sea,
this time turned into the whales and other large mammals. Sedna could
fight no more and began to sink herself.
Sedna, tourmented and
raging with anger for what had happened to her, did not perish. She
became, and still is today, the goddess of the sea. Sedna's companions
are the seals, and the whales that sit with her at the bottom on the
ocean. Her anger and fury against man is what drums up the violent seas
and storms . Hunters have a great respect for her. Legend has it that
they must treat her with respect. Shaman's from the world above must
swim down to her to comb her long black tangled hair. This calms Sedna
down. Once this is done, she releases her mammals to allow the Inuit to
eat from the bounty of the sea. It is for this reason in the north that
after a hunter catches a seal he drops water into the mouth of the
mammal, a gesture to thank Sedna for her kindness in allowing him to
feed his family.
— Sedna is the Inuit Goddess of the Sea and here is another version which includes an Inuit theory of the origin of Whites and Indians
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.
(thanks Peter for the tip)
Update: things have been
moving quickly with the Sedna discovery except for yours truly who is
still very much in holiday mode. Tim May has pointed out to me
that this discovery is far more interesting than I had originally
realised:
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.
The rock is currently about 13 billion
kilometres away but its orbit is so eccentric that it should swing as far away as
130 billion kilometres before returning towards the sun. It has an orbital period of 10,500 years.