How far away is Sedna?
Sedna is the most distant solar system object ever discovered. It is twice as far from the sun as any other solar system object and three times farther than Pluto or Neptune. Standing on the surface of Sedna, you could block the entire sun with the head of a pin held at arm’s length. Even more interestingly, the orbit of Sedna is extreme elliptical, in contrast to all of the much closer planets, and it takes 10,500 years to circle the sun. Here is an image of the orbit and position compared to all the known solar system objects (click for bigger version) The sun is in the middle of the swarm of solar system objects. You can see that Sedna is at 90 AU (1 AU is an Astronomical Unit, the distance between the earth and the Sun, about 150 million kilometers, or 93 million miles). Don’t miss the fabulous video, put together by Robert Hurt at the Spitzer Science Center, showing a zoom out from the earth to Sedna to the Oort cloud (Robert is also responsible for the artist’s rendition of Sedna
