STARGAZERS at Jodrell Bank are poring over atlases after the discovery of an alleged tenth planet orbiting the sun.
An educational project - Spaced Out - was launched this week to create a scale map of the solar system to set out the relative locations of all known planets.
A model of the sun is to be placed at the Cheshire radio observatory with the other heavenly bodies set out across Britain according to their relative distances apart.
But the discovery of Sedna, described as a possible new planet orbiting the sun at a distance of eight billion miles, has got scientists on the project scratching their heads. It is twice as far away as Pluto, which, until this week, was the farthest known planet from the sun.
Physicist Dr Nigel Marshall, who is among the organisers of Spaced Out, has been forced to search beyond the Scottish isles for a model location.
"This discovery has doubled our knowledge of the solar system and turned the whole project upside down," he said.
Sedna, named after the Inuit goddess of the ocean, is the most distant object detected in the solar system.
Dr Marshall said: "These rocky objects are important because they contain the earliest compounds from the time the solar system was formed."
Sedna's orbit would take it to the north of Scotland, but it may pass close to the Faroe Islands. Otherwise, its location on the Jodrell map will have to be in mainland Europe.
Astro-physicists have not decided if Sedna is too small to qualify as a planet.
Other mapped planets include Mercury at Chelford, Venus at Alderley Edge, Earth at Macclesfield, Mars at Northwich and Jupiter at Wrexham.
Pluto will be at Fort William, Saturn at Lancaster and Uranus will be at Bath.