That’s just crazy..”

Interesting idea this brings up… I think that rather than a planet, Sedna may more likely be a comet. The comets mostly originate in the Oort cloud and have highly eccentric orbits that can range from 76 years (Halley’s comet) out at least as far as 60,000 years (either Hyakutake or Hale-Bopp if my flawed memory serves right). I guess the way to find out without actually visiting Sedna would be if Sedna’s orbit brings it inside the orbit of Jupiter – that is roughly the demarcation point where the solar wind heats up a comet enough so that it starts to outgas (ice sublimating into a gas) and the debris and gas is blown away from the Sun. It’s strange to note that comets approach the Sun with their tails behind them, but when they leave the comet follows it’s tail out – the tail is always pointing away from the Sun.

Actually, with the asteroids being between Mars and Jupiter, it would have been more like My Very Efficient Mother Chilled Pork Jelly, Voluntarily Just Serving Us.

What else are we going to use? The process of learning involves building on and exrapolating what we allready know. To use something alien to compare and measure with would be completely illogical.

And me being an 18-year old, I may not be at the proper age for remembering this, but I seem to recall something about a “Planet X”??

You probably know this by now, but just for the sake of it; to my knowledge wasn’t the whole Planet X thing dispelled? Uranus was found by following up anomalies in Neptune’s orbit. But there were still anomalies in both planet’s orbits, leading up to a theorized Planet X. Percival Lowell projected co-ordinates for the new planet, and thus Pluto was found. Theories popped up about Pluto actually being much bigger than what was merely visible, but it’s moon Charon put those to rest. In the end Neptune ended up being larger than originally thought when Voyager 2 made it’s trip there, thus there weren’t any problems in the first place.

But it makes sense to think that this isn’t the coincident it’s made out to be. Moreso just inevitability. You have this stack of Kuiper Belt objects floating around that nobody pays attention to. If you point anywhere, nomatter how you got the co-ordinates, you’re bound to find something. Pluto just happened to be where they pinned the donkey’s tail.

Marisa Brook said: “And such a reclassification has actually been done before. Ceres, the largest asteroid and the first to be discovered, was considered a planet from its accidental discovery in 1801 until about 1850.”

Now this (to me at least), is by far the most fascinating part of the article. Because with further investigation, and found this.

Wikipedia: “There is some historical precedent for “demoting” a “planet” in the light of subsequent discoveries. The first four asteroids (1 Ceres, 2 Pallas, 3 Juno and 4 Vesta) were considered to be planets for several decades (in part because their sizes were not accurately known at the time). However, in 1845, the first new asteroid in thirty-eight years was discovered (5 Astraea), just one year before Neptune, and soon every year brought more asteroid discoveries.”

This means that between 1801 and 1845 before Neptune, there was thought to be 11 planets in our solar system.

smokefoot said: “Kids might be learning “My Very Efficient Mother Just Served Us Nine Pickles So Xerxes Quit Playing With Us Because He Hates Pickles Except With Sourkraut…”"

Try, “My Very Efficient Mother Just Served Us Cold Pork Jelly Valiantly.”

Do you mean all rotating in the same direction or all rotating counter-clockwise?

Well, whether it’s going clockwise or counter-clockwise depends on the arbitrary decision of which side of the solar system you define as the “top”. If you treat the other side of the solar system as the “top” then it’s rotating clockwise.

Since there is no objective way to determine what side of another solar system is the “top” and they appear in all sorts of orientations, they will only all rotate counter-clockwise if you define the “top” of a solar system as the side where everything rotates counter-clockwise.

As far as I’m aware though, of the few stars known to have multiple planets all of them have planets that all orbit the star in the same direction. That being said, there is a newly forming solar system that has been found to have the materials in it rotating around the center in opposite directions. See here:

Newly Forming Solar System Has Planets Running Backwards (2/13/’06)
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/goddard/news/topstory/2006/opposite_orbit.html
(Note: Ignore the title of the article, no planets have actually formed yet.)

So, while all of the solar systems we know of currently have all of their planets orbiting in the same direction, we may still someday find a star that has planets orbiting in opposite directions that have been doing so since that solar system was formed.