Facts about Sedna's extreme aphelion
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Sedna's extreme aphelion means the dwarf planet spends roughly 99 percent of its 11,400-year orbit in the frozen outer reaches beyond 500 astronomical units from the Sun.
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Sedna's extreme aphelion creates a gravitational zone so weak that the dwarf planet experiences only about 0.00002 times the Sun's surface gravity, making stellar influences from passing stars potentially significant to its trajectory.
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Sedna's extreme aphelion renders the Sun so dim that it would appear as merely the brightest star in the sky rather than a disk visible to the naked eye from the dwarf planet's surface.
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Sedna's discoverers in 2003 named it after an Inuit goddess of the ocean because her extreme aphelion takes her to the coldest, most isolated depths of the solar system.
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Sedna's perihelion of 76 AU still places it nearly twice as far from the Sun as Neptune, making it perpetually among the solar system's most distant objects even at its closest approach.
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Sedna's aphelion occurs roughly every 5,700 years, meaning the dwarf planet was near its farthest point around 3700 BCE when ancient Egyptian civilization was emerging.
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The extreme aphelion of Sedna means sunlight takes approximately 13 hours to reach the dwarf planet at its farthest point from our star.
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Sedna's extreme aphelion distance of 937 AU places it beyond the hypothetical inner Oort Cloud, suggesting gravitational perturbations from an unknown massive object may have scattered it into such a distant orbit.
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Sedna's orbital period of 11,400 years means the dwarf planet has completed less than one full orbit since modern humans existed.
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At approximately 937 astronomical units from the Sun, Sedna reaches an aphelion roughly 25 times farther than Neptune's orbit.