Say hello to Sedna.

American astronomers will announce the discovery of a tenth planet/planetoid orbiting the Sun, beyond Pluto. The body, roughly the size of Pluto, orbits in the Kuiper Belt in an elliptical orbit between 6 and 84 billion miles from Earth, and has been named Sedna, after the angry Inuit goddess of the ocean. She was forced to marry a dog by her father, who then drowned the dog after Sedna bore his puppies, and was then tricked into marrying a white raven. When the raven attacked the boat in which she and her father were escaping, her father threw her overboard. As she tried to climb back into the boat, he cut off her fingers, which became the whales and other large sea mammals that accompany her in the frigid Arctic waters.

Sedna was discovered by scientists from the California Institute of Technology's Palomar observatory near San Diego, and was confirmed by sightings from the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes. As the most distant object yet discovered in heliocentic orbit, "it never gets above 400 degrees below Fahrenheit. And it's so far away that if you were on Sedna and looking back at the sun, an astronomer says you could block it out with the head of a pin." One orbit around the sun takes 10,500 earth years. As with Pluto, Sedna's status as a full-fledged planet is up for debate.