Her name is Sedna and she's far out man. This is planetary radio. Radio. Officially her name is still 2003 v. B 12, but her discoverers want to name her after

the Inuit goddess of the cold deeps.

One of them, Principal investigator Mike Brown, joins us to talk about this mysterious

member of the solar system family. And speaking of deep space, Emily will be

telling us where it begins in this week's Q&A.

Later it's Bruce Bax with What's Up and our new trivia contest

from deep in the heart of Texas.

Stay tuned y'all. Hi, I'm Emily Lockwala with questions and answers. A listener asked, where does deep space begin?

Deep space is a slang term that seems to have originated among amateur astronomers.

The earliest use of the term was in the 1940s in Sky and Telescope magazine.

It has come to mean beyond the solar system. But as amateur

telescopes have grown larger, deep space has become deeper. The general

notion is that deep space objects are dim ones requiring relatively large telescopes or

magnification. Anything visible to the naked eye is not a deep space object

including nearby galaxies. There are more technically exact terms out there. You can describe the space within

the Moon's orbit as Siz lunar, and the space outside is trans lunar, and the meaning of the terms

interplanetary, interstellar, and intergalactic space are pretty obvious.

But none of these terms captures the romance of the term deep space.

For an alternative way of looking at what this term means, stay tuned to planetary radio.

They first saw her last November, but the announcement that she is farther than any other

objects circling our son came just a week ago. Sedna may be three-fourths the size of Pluto, but her three discoverers say she isn't a planet.

Mike Brown, David Rabinowitz, and Chad Trujillo work with a state-of-the-art CCD camera,

...