Could Sedna Be the Sumerian Red Planet?

[Memnoch]

Sedna is a recently discovered object in space. Apparently it's composed primarily of ice and similar elements. Apparently Sedna is red also.
Sedna also holds an interesting eliptical orbit around the sun.
Could Sedna be the planet the Sumarians were referring to when they spoke of seeing a larger red planet passing by the Earth?
I'm thinking that if Sedna is primarily made of ice than the closer it would get to the sun than the more the ice would melt and the more the planet might shrink as it left it's residue in space. This object may have come close to the Earth at one point in Mankinds written history and might possibly be the planet the Sumarians wrote about.
This is just a random thought and not solid at all but I thought I'd throw it out there to see what everyone else thought.
Kind Regards,
Memnoch

 

[Mike2]

Do you have a more complete reference to your quote, "the planet the Sumarians wrote about", perhaps a full quote please?

 

[Memnoch]

Sure, http://www.crystalinks.com/nibiru.html is a link to a site that fantasizes about the planet. For a while there's been a controversy about this planet the Sumarians were speaking about. There's also controversy over the translation of their writings and glyphs. It gets a bit overdramatic but the fact is that the Sumarians did write about a "13th planet" so to speak or 10th back then. They kept pretty interesting records of astronomical events which is interestingly suprising for that time.
This 10th planet or 13th is also referred to as "Planet X" which I'm sure most have read about. NASA said something about it's possible existence but nothing was ever confirmed. With the discovery of Sedna I'm thinking it may have something to do with the past. Sumarians writing about a big red planet near the Earth and then the discovery of a small red ice object in space with an eliptical orbit which the Sumarians wrote about also kinda seems to fit. Although this was just a random thought I had.
I don't fall to the fanatical beliefs of aliens on this object or anything like that but I'm thinking this might just be the "planet" the Sumarians wrote about long ago that faded into the distance of space.
Kind Regards,
Memnoch

 

[Memnoch]

http://www.apollonius.net/nibiru.html
This is one more link that may provide some more information.
One more thing to note is that I don't fall to the fanatikism of the Planet-X sites. They're pretty outrageous and really hold no ground. If you do a Google search on Planet X you can find a lot of interesting information and a lot of laughable content on the sites. NASA.Gov is an interesting place to do research on the subject also.
http://www.darkstar1.co.uk/sedna.htm
The site above holds more ground and information. Not so much fanatikism of the other mentioned sites.

 

[Nereid]

There some pretty thorough debunking of the whole Planet X nonsense on the Bad Astronomy website. The worst (? saddest?) part about the nonsense is that the most elementary examination shows gross ignorance of astronomy (even willful ignorance?), and even a reluctance to do some basic research (buy a telescope?).

Could Sedna be the red planet the Sumerians talked about? Assuming for the moment that they did talk about a red planet, then the answer is NO. Unless of course they had ~1m (or bigger) telescopes with CCD devices, and an awful lot of patience (to examine ~1 billion images that look like stars). Sedna is currently about as close as it will ever get to the Sun (and Earth), and it's >20 mag.

 

[Phobos]

Welcome to Physics Forums, Memnoch.

Eventually, I'll move this topic to the "skepticism/debunking" forum, but for now I'll leave it here so the astronomy folks can offer their insight first.

Link for the Bad Astronomy explanation Nereid mentioned...
http://www.badastronomy.com/bad/misc/planetx/index.html

 

[Memnoch]

Hahah, sorry about those links. They're a bit overdramatic. lol Thanks for the welcome also :) This is an awesome place to get some of my random thoughts out :)
I was just wondering if this could tie into the history of our ancient civilizations since Sedna is a Red Ice planet with an eliptical orbit. I was thinking that the closer it would get to the sun the more ice would melt from this object, possibly drifting into space and leaving a residue. But as some ancient cultures have said, there was a large red planet that passed by the Earth and disappeared into space. I was thinking this may be a potential for being that "planet X" or large red planet spoken about back in the old days. heh

 

[Memnoch]

I just read Nereid's response. Thanks for the information. I thought I would throw out another random thought.
I completely agree with you in regards to the whole overdramatic belief system of Planet X and it's existence.
The thought crossed my mind since I'd heard so much about that planet a while back. I was thinking that this may add some logic to the whole thing but oh well. lol

 

[Nereid]

Oh those Sumarians! They surely saw, and recorded, Mercury, Venus, the Moon, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn. Did they see (and record) any other solar system objects? Well, they would certainly have seen plenty of comets - most people will see several naked eye comets in their lifetimes (or could, if they looked). They *could* have seen Uranus - it's just barely visible, and Ganymede (and Callisto?) too. IIRC, there are reliable reports of Arabian astronomers recording at least one of the Galilean moons, well before telescopes.

... and that's pretty much it. They certainly didn't see Neptune or Pluto.