It has a twelve thousand year orbit around the sun and at its most distant it is something like five or ten degrees above absolute zero, appropriate for the Inuit godess of the sea I'd like to point out. And what's strange about this one, there are so many strange things about this one. What's strange about this one is that we happened to find this one almost at the closest point it ever gets to the sun. Not by coincidence, because there is only about a 200 year period shown in red here, where we could have seen it. If it had been out here, or out here, or way out here, it would have been so faint that we would have had no chance whatsoever. So, 200 years out of 12,000 years means a 1 in 60 chance of finding it. So either we are very lucky, astronomers don't like to think of themselves as lucky, or scientists in general - or instead, what we like to think is that if we found something and we only had a 1 in 60 chance of finding it, probably there are 60 of them and we just found the one that happened to be close. There might be 60 that are sort of like this or like this or like this, and one of them is close enough to see at the time. Now, maybe it's not 60. Maybe it's 30 and we got a little bit lucky. Maybe there are 90 and we got a little bit unlucky. But there are a lot of objects in this very distant region where we never knew of anything before. This is the first time we ever found anything in this region, out here.

Now the fun thing to think about is, if there are 60 of these, and Sedna is about three quarters the size of Pluto, if there are 60 objects three quarters the size of Pluto, there are probably 30 objects the size of Pluto. That's a lot of objects the size of Pluto. There are probably 10 objects that are twice the size of Pluto, and there are probably two or three objects that are three or four, and maybe even five times the size of Pluto in this region here. It's a little bit vague, since we have only found one object, to be able to try to extrapolate to these things. But it's not that vague. There must be some of these very large objects out there. Our big goal now, and one of my current graduate student's PhD thesis is to find these objects. If there are some big objects, two or three or four times the size of Pluto, these things are the size of Mercury, these things are the size of Mars, these things are the size of the Earth.

If you take that final thought and look at the Kuiper belt and put this object on there, that's the size of Mars, I am willing to go out on a limb and say that we will find something like that the size of Mars somewhere in this region of space. And scientifically this is going to be fantastic because we are going to be able to get to learn about an entirely new class of objects and try to understand how they got there. But just as much fun, of course, is that this will cause astronomers to go into a tizzy again. Because, if you find it, what do you call it? Well, by the current definition, I forgot to tell you, of course the current definition is that you have the eight planets and if you are not a planet but you are still one of those round things, you are a dwarf planet. That's a weird word because there are very few cases in the English language where you have adjective noun combination "Dwarf planet" that is not a planet. Dwarf planets are not planets. They are dwarf planets. But by this definition this object the size of Mars would be a dwarf planet.

I actually believe that that's the right classification. Because I still think that this population deserves to be put together and that the planets are actually a special case. But I don't think most people are going to buy that. I think if you find something the size of Mars, something the size of the Earth, I think most people are going to want to call it a planet. [astronomers ..?] Maybe they are going to have as much fun as they did in Prague. The next big meeting is going to be in Rio de Janero in two and a half years, no telling what might happen then. If we are lucky we will find one of these by then, but there will definitely be these very big objects, I think this will be the next big realm of what we find. If we are really lucky we will find them in two or three years. They have to be a little bit close. Otherwise it is going to take another ten or fifteen and some bigger telescopes. But that's where we are headed and that's where this whole field is I think going next.