dxd,
In answer to your question of
“...why her name was given to this particular orbiting body. I took it upon myself to look up and actually call “Michael E. Brown” in the Division of Geological and Planetary Sciences at the Spitzer Space Telescope Laboratory at Caltech. He is one of the three gentlemen, Chad Trujillo (Gemini Observatory, Hawaii) and David Rabinowitz (Yale University) are the other two men, who discovered Sedna.
I asked him what their reasoning was for naming the planet Sedna. His response was this:
In reply to:
We were looking at this planet that is out in the dark regions of space which reminded us of the cold polar regions of earth which in turn reminded me of the Inuit Indian tribes. We did some research and stumbled across the story of the Goddess Sedna. I fell in love with her story as did Chad and David. It is due to this that we decided to name the planet Sedna, being that it is polar in nature due to its lack of sunlight and that it is remote. There is not real connection other then our love for the story and that the planet is mainly made of ice.
So, now we know why the planet was named Sedna.
Oh, and if anyone would like to know how it was that I contacted him, here is his web site.
http:// www.gps.caltech.edu/~mbrown/
Rev. Alimae
