A mysterious cloud of space rock and debris in the outer reaches of our solar system might resemble a miniature galaxy, a new study has claimed. The Oort Cloud, named after Dutch astronomer Jan Oort in 1950, is an extremely distant spherical shell of icy cloud, whose exact shape and how it behaves has remained a mystery since its discovery. However, using a new model, researchers have suggested that the inner structure of the Oort Cloud may look like a spiral disk.
For the yet-to-be peer-reviewed study, scientists used NASA’s Pleiades supercomputer to model the structure of the Oort cloud based on the trajectories of comets as well as the gravitational forces within and beyond our solar system.
Upon analysis, they found that Oort Cloud contained an inner structure similar to the spiral arms of the Milky Way galaxy.
“As the Galactic tide acts to decouple bodies from the scattered disk it creates a spiral structure in physical space that is roughly 15,000 AU in length,” the study highlighted.
“The spiral is long-lived and persists in the inner Oort cloud to the present time,” it added, noting that direct observational detection of the spiral remains difficult due to the distance.
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How far is Oort Cloud?
As per NASA, Oort Cloud is the most distant region in our solar system with its inner edge located between 2,000 and 5,000 astronomical units or AU from the Sun, with the outer edge located somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 AU from the Sun. For the scale of the distance, Pluto’s elliptical orbit carries it between about 30 and 50 AU from the Sun.
There may be hundreds of billions, even trillions, of icy bodies in the Oort Cloud. Every once in a while, something disturbs the orbit of one of these icy worlds, and it begins a long journey toward our Sun. Two recent examples are comets C/2012 S1 (ISON) and C/2013 A1 Siding Spring.
Previous research has suggested that the Oort Cloud contains remnants of the solar system’s planets, which were formed over four billion years ago.
