In a nice interview with Newsweek International's Fred Guterl, Mike Brown touches on Sedna's planetary status and talks a little about its surprising bright redness. Oddly he doesn't mention the most obvious explanation for a lump of ice being bright red: alien art. (Iceberg via Electrolite and YAWL, whose webmistress clearly remembers her John Varley stories...)
I like the line, “Yet scientists just can't stop fiddling with the solar system.” No kidding! I think the whole “Is Pluto a planet?” question is amusing. When I was in grade school:
Most textbooks still said Mercury had one face turned to the sun, very little was known about Venus, Mars was a red Moon (bone dry), virtually all asteroids were between Mars and Jupiter, Jupiter had twelve moons, its intense Van Allen belts were unknown, its moons rocky, Io a dead world. Saturn was the only ringed planet and had nine moons, Titan was the largest moon in the system, Pluto was much larger and didn’t have a moon, there was no Kuiper belt. Pulsars had only been recently discovered and Black Holes were completely theoretical … there’s much, much more. Why should we be surprised if we have to change our picture of the universe again?
Posted by: VR | April 10, 2004 at 12:26 AM