Discovery of a Candidate Inner Oort Cloud Planetoid

@article{Brown2004DiscoveryOA,
  title={Discovery of a Candidate Inner Oort Cloud Planetoid},
  author={Michael E. Brown and Chadwick A. Trujillo and David L. Rabinowitz},
  journal={The Astrophysical Journal},
  year={2004},
  volume={617},
  pages={645-649}
}
We report the discovery of the minor planet (90377) Sedna, the most distant object ever seen in the solar system. Prediscovery images from 2001, 2002, and 2003 have allowed us to refine the orbit sufficiently to conclude that Sedna is on a highly eccentric orbit that permanently resides well beyond the Kuiper Belt with a semimajor axis of 480 ± 40 AU and a perihelion of 76 ± 4 AU. Such an orbit is unexpected in our current understanding of the solar system but could be the result of scattering… Expand
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