On 14 November, 2003, Michael Brown, associate professor of planetary astronomy at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, was running a few minutes late for a class he teaches. He had planned to tell the students that there is nothing in the solar system beyond the Kuiper Belt, which he said has a strong outer edge at about 49 AU. Instead, he cryptically told the students, I am not sure this is true anymore. That morning, he and several other members of his research team had discovered an orb no more than 1,700 km in diameter that currently is about 13 billion km--or, about 90 AU--from the Sun. The planetoid, which the researchers have dubbed Sedna for the Inuit goddess of the ocean, is believed to be the most distant known object in our solar system from the Sun. Sedna's solar period is 10,500 years, and its most distant point from the Sun is 130 billion km.