#nkdne

This yet-to-be-named song is about 90377 Sedna, a dwarf planet discovered in 2003 that spawned a new class of astronomical objects (the aptly-named sednoids, of which we've only found a few). Why did this roughly Ceres-sized body warrant creating a new category? Because its orbit is so elongated that it takes Sedna unfathomably far from the Sun -- the closest part of its orbit is over 2.5x Neptune's orbit in terms of distance from the Sun, and the farthest part of its orbit is over 12 times as far as that closer part. It takes Pluto 248 years to orbit the Sun once; it takes Sedna 11,400. Its orbit is an unthinkably large oval that cannot have been perturbed by any (known) planetary masses and takes it into the void farther and for longer than we can comprehend. Why does it orbit like this? What could have made it orbit like this? What's out there in the infinite dark that we don't see or know? And they say cosmic horror is fiction!

Schadenfreude (You Wouldn't Know) is a song about the demotion of Pluto from planet to dwarf planet from the perspective of Ceres, a dwarf planet and the largest asteroid -- a body familiar with such a demotion. Ceres was the first asteroid discovered, and it was originally considered a planet; but like Pluto, astronomers just ended up finding more and more small bodies in the same area and eventually had to reclassify the thing. Can you imagine going through that, just to see the exact same scenario happen again?