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Distant Sedna: Planet of mystery

Scientists worldwide are likely to demand substantial further funding to probe the mysteries of Sedna — the distant, lonely world wandering aimlessly around the galaxy some 13bn km from the Sun.

The global demand for research grant application forms has increased by and incredible 1,274 per cent since the discovery of "Planet X" on 15 March. The recent revelation that it does not have a moon as previously thought is likely to further fuel demand.

"Some ordinary people might imagine that the non-discovery of Sedna's moon would mean vital funds could be diverted to more pressing matters," one visibly-flushed boffin told The Rockall Times. "Not so. In fact Sedna's long rotational period — in excess of 20 days — would normally be explained by the presence of such a body. Working out what's going on here could take months, even years."

Teams of researchers have, however, been able to reveal some astounding facts about Sedna. Its distance from the Sun is equivalent to 600bn double-decker buses parked bumper-to-bumper, or 1,200,000bn EC regulation medium-sized courgettes laid end-end-to-end.

"Any one living on Sedna would receive EastEnders some 16 minutes after terrestrial viewers," said one expert working up a plan for human colonisation of the planet. "We call this 'soap lag' and it would certainly be a serious impediment to our ambitious plan to exploit Sedna's rich mineral resources.

"Equally, Sednovians would be obliged to work a 400-hour day without the benefit of witty text messages from their earthbound colleagues to keep up morale and with the added handicap of virtually no gravity to keep them anchored to the surface," he concluded with a shrug.

However, the huge teams of Sedna researchers mobilising themselves for a golden age of funding received a very nasty shock last night after a rival outfit uncovered the most distant planet yet known to science — a whopping 17,000,000 light years away. The body — lying in the constellation of Sagittarius — is about one-and-a-half times the size of Jupiter and is likely to prove a powerful weapon in the fight to secure the maximum funding possible for the search for things floating about in space.

"Sedna's quite interesting in a moon-less sort of way," snorted one member of the jubilant most-distant-planet-in-the-universe — ever! team, "but our body is no less than the equivalent of 18,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Eiffel Towers from Earth. If its mass were calculated in grapefruit and all of those grapefruit laid side-by-side, they would stretch beyond the limits of the known universe. And by the time the inhabitants of our mineral-rich got the episode of EastEnders where Angie lied to Den about having cancer, the Earth would already have been consumed by our own exploding Sun."

Meanwhile, comet hunters are said to be "shattered" by recent developments in the hunt for extraterrestrial bodies. "We haven't had a decent new comet for years," lamented one extremely thin, straggle-haired man chewing forlornly on a long-empty pizza box. "Unless we get a result sharpish, it's back to cleaning toilets at MIT for the lot of us," he sobbed.

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