Yale Bulletin and Calendar

March 19, 2004|Volume 32, Number 22

The camera that helped spot the new planetoid -- named Sedna, after the Inuit goddess of the sea -- was constructed by a team of Yale scientists that included (from left) Suzanne Tourtellotte, Tom Hurteau, Nancy Ellman, David Rabinowitz (a member of the discovery team), Charles Baltay and Rochelle Lauer.

Yale scientist on team that
discovered new planetoid

NASA and a team of researchers from the California Institute of Technology, Yale and Gemini Observatory have reported the discovery of the most distant object in the solar system.

Nearly the size of Pluto and more than three times as far away, it has been designated "2003 VB16" and unofficially named "Sedna."

The discovery was made on Nov. 14 with a specially constructed detector mounted on the 48-inch-diameter telescope at the Palomar Observatory in California. The "planetoid" was verified by telescopes in Spain, Arizona, Hawaii and Chile operated by the SMARTS (Small and Moderate Aperture Research Telescope System) Consortium, set up by Yale and 10 other U.S. institutions to provide access to small research telescopes in the southern hemisphere. NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope was unable to detect it at infrared wavelengths, confirming information about its nature and size as a cold object, smaller than Pluto and no more than 1,000 miles in diameter.

The discovery team consisted of Michael Brown at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), David Rabinowitz at Yale and Chad Trujillo at the Gemini Observatory.

The camera used by the team is one of the largest ever built. A single exposure covers a huge patch of sky, 40 times larger than the full moon. The group will be using this camera to repeat the search of the whole sky that led to the discovery of Pluto in 1930. This time, the search will be 100 times more sensitive. Charles Baltay, professor of applied physics and astronomy at Yale, built the camera -- with over 160 million pixels and 112 CCD detectors -- for the Samuel Oschin Schmidt telescope at Palomar.

Other members of the construction team at Yale were Rabinowitz, William Emmet, Tom Hurteau, Nancy Ellman and Rochelle Lauer. Professor James Musser, Mark Gebhard and Brice Adams designed the electronics at Indiana University.

"In reviewing the whole sky, we are finding some very big objects. This one might be about the size of Pluto, but much further away," says Rabinowitz, a research scientist in the Department of Physics. "The characteristics of this object are consistent with it residing in the 'Oort cloud,' a reservoir of long-period comets like Hale-Bopp that has been hypothesized since 1950."

This new body, three times farther from the sun than Neptune, is nearly 10 billion miles from the sun. Its orbit is elliptical in shape and ranges from roughly seven to 100 billion miles away from the sun.

Information and images are available at www.nasa.gov, www.gps.caltech.edu/~chad/sedna, www.astro.yale.edu/smarts, hepwww.physics.yale.edu/quest/quest_docs/aas_2004a.htm and www.spitzer.caltech.edu/Media/releases/ssc2004-05.

T H I SW E E K ' SS T O R I E S

Yale scientist on team that discovered new planetoid

Robert Blocker has been reappointed to third term . . .

Center to foster research on cerebral cortex

Bulldogs' Nate Lawrie busy preparing himself for NFL Draft

Political scientist Ian Shapiro named YCIAS director

Zbigniew Brzezinski . . . to present talk on campus

Magic, comic mayhem prevail in re-telling of old tale

'Digital Cops in a Virtual Environment' will explore . . .

Conference to consider 'The Future of Secularism'

Exhibit features works by artist who combined fact and fantasy . . .

NIDA director discusses complicated causes . . . of drug addiction

Castle Lectures to explore materialism in today's culture

English faculty to present staged reading of 'Pentecost'

'Enclave' to explore architectural aspects of ports of commerce

In Focus: Office of Cooperative Research