How many planets are there?

I’ve always had my head in the stars.

At least that’s what my pre-school teacher told my parents.

But it’s true, on a clear Karnes County night, I like to sometimes gaze upward and wonder about what things are like a million miles away… a billion... a trillion…

Although I will probably never be able to focus on it with my naked eyes, I understand that astronomers have made a recent discovery.

It’s called Sedna, named for the Inuit goddess who made the sea creatures of the Arctic, and the reason it’s so darned hard to see is because it’s only about 1,000 miles wide and is about 8 billion miles away from Cestohowa.

For those of you, who like me, are somewhat "number challenged," trying to see Sedna from Earth is comparable to trying to see a single grain of sand from a jet airplane flying over a beach.

You really have to squint hard.

Scientists are trying to decide if Sedna should be included in the group of solar system neighbors we call "planets."

Some say that if Pluto is a planet, then so should Sedna, but others say that neither Pluto nor Sedna should be considered planets.

As far as I’m concerned, Pluto is a dog whose owner is a mouse, and this is just not right.

Animals just should not own other animals.

Regardless of what they decide to call it, Sedna is still out there.

Way out there.

And it’s been sitting there for the past four and a half billion years at a temperature of 400 degrees below zero.

And I thought Canada was cold.

Other interesting facts about Sedna:

It’s reddish in color.

It’s three times farther than Pluto (the ninth and outermost planet, not the dog.)

It’s the largest object found orbiting the sun since the discovery of Pluto in 1930.

A year on Sedna is equivalent to 10,500 "earth years."

That’s a long time between summer vacations.

Sedna is sometimes 84 billion miles from the sun. If you were standing on Sedna and looked up at the sun, the sun would appear so small that a pin’s head could block it out.

Sedna is, apparently, the first known member of the Oort Cloud, a sphere of material orbiting the sun that, hypothetically, is the source of some comets.

I’ve noticed that a lot of the work of astronomers is "hypothetical."

All the same though, thinking of the strange world of Sedna fuels the imagination.

I wonder if there’s someone on Sedna writing about the strange recently discovered blue planet 8 billion miles away.