by The Oort cloud is traditionally regarded as a huge shell of perhaps trillion icy objects that surround our solar system and serve as a final border between us and the dark ranges of the interstellar space.
But it is not a homogeneous mass. In reality, astronomers have no complete could be.
Now in A New study Posted in published in The astrophysical journalA team of researchers from the Southwest Research Institute in Colorado Suppose you have discovered a fascinating aspect of the interior of the Oort cloud, which can change the way we see its general form: a spiral structure that resembles the spiral arms of our galaxy.
At a heliocentric distance in the range of 10,000 to 100,000 astronomical units – each unit is equally the distance between the sun and earth – the Oort -cloud is incredibly large and completely out of reach. There is little sunlight to speak, and watching the cloud is almost unaffordable from such a distance.
The seclusion of the Oortwolke also means that the gravity of the sun is relatively weak. Instead, astronomers believe that its unbelievable number of objects is largely ruled by what is referred to as the “galactic flood” – the gravity of the gravity of massive objects such as black holes in the middle of our galaxy, which dries up through the Milky Way as our solar system. (For objects near the sun and planets, the effect of the flood is largely overwhelmed by the gravity of the star.)
This is what the researchers are raised: The effects of the galactic flood. To do this, they observed long-period comets that come from the oort cloud and come into the interior of the solar system after the sunset was displaced The galactic tide, Provision of a rare shimmer in cloud history. In particular, some of the comets come from a denser region, which is known as the “inner” Oort -Cloud, which, according to the researchers, has long been protected as a flat hard drive in the ball shell of the Greater Cloud.
Feeding data on these comets Together with other observations In an advanced model about the Pleiades Supercomputer from the NASA, the researchers found that the image “flat hard drive” could be outdated. It is more of a “slightly distorted” hard drive, as they have found, about 15,000 au.
“The disc, if it is viewed from a distance, would appear as a spiral structure with two twisted arms,” the authors wrote. These “arms” resemble the elongated structures of a spiral galaxy like our own Milky Way.
In an epic time scale “comparable to the age of the solar system”, which is 4.6 billion years old, the researchers believe that the spiral arms were formed, as “small bodies” from the interior of the system were pushed to around 1,000 to 10,000, where they developed through the galacticide “. This indicates that the spiral structure has been here almost since the start of our system and the form is retained.
In order to endure the results, the researchers hope that one day we will be able to observe some of the objects that lurk in the inner Oort cloud – but the technology required for this is probably a long way.
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