Mistake on MSNBC? Sedna's temp below absolute zero?

Here is the article’s URL:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4533039/

Direct quote: “At Sedna’s distance, temperatures would not get higher than 400 degrees below zero Fahrenheit (-280 degrees Celsius), making it the coldest known celestial body in the solar system, Brown told journalists.”

… Wait a minute… Isn’t absolute zero 273.16 degrees below 0 Celsius? Either I didn’t understand something about absolute zero or absolute zero isn’t really absolute zero… or this is just a mis-quote/mis-print.

Help me out or back me up here.

-400 degrees farenheit is -240 degrees celsius and above absolute zero, it’s probably a mistake by the journalist rather than Brown himself.

Yeah, you’re right. Someone screwed up the conversion pretty good. Minus 400 F would be -240 C. Absolute zero is approximately -459F/-273C.

Perhaps the author was thinking about Datsuns and confused the 240Z with the 280Z.

Looks like a shoddy rounding of figures to me. We were always told to do that when I worked on a newspaper: Joe Public being too dim to understand fiddly numbers, everything was changed to BIIIG ROUUND ones… and while an individual writer might be smart enough to know which figures shouldn’t be rounded (years, for example) every article passed through the claws of at least half a dozen sub editors who’d chew it up by insisting on the dumbest of rules in the most inappropriate places.

In short, typo. Semi-deliberate misprunt.