NASA supercomputer discovers strange spiral structure at the edge of the solar system

At the edge of our solar system, a NASA supercomputer has discovered an unusual spiral structure. It turned out to be the mysterious Oort cloud, which is the source of many comets.

Until now, astronomers had no idea what it looked like, but the latest modeling has revealed this mystery. According to new research, the Oort Cloud, which is a mysterious envelope of icy objects in our solar system, may have a pair of spiral arms that make it look like a miniature galaxy, LiveScience reports.

Scientists say that the Oort Cloud originated as unused remnants of giant planets (Jupiter, Neptune, Uranus, and Saturn) after they formed 4.6 billion years ago. Some of these remnants are so large that they can be considered dwarf planets.

When these planets began to orbit the Sun, their motions threw the excess material far beyond Pluto's orbit, where they are today, the researchers say.

According to the scientists, the inner edge of the Oort Cloud is located at a distance of approximately 2,000 to 5,000 AU from the Sun, and its outer edge is located at a distance of 10,000 to 100,000 AU. Recall that an AU is 150 million kilometers, which is roughly the average distance from the Earth to the Sun.

The researchers emphasize that even at the current speed of about 1.6 million kilometers per day, NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft will not reach the Oort Cloud for 300 years and will not leave it for another 300,000.

This extraordinary distance means that the bodies in the cloud are too small and faint - and moving too slowly - to be directly imaged by even the most powerful telescopes, experts say.

To better understand what the Oort Cloud might look like, the researchers used information from comet orbits and gravitational forces inside and outside our solar system to build a model of the cloud's structure.

One of the keys to understanding the shape of the Oort Cloud is the "galactic tide" - the pull created by stars, black holes, and the center of our galaxy, which has a decisive influence on objects in the cloud, but for objects closer to the Sun, is masked by the gravity of our star, the experts explain.

When the scientists ran this model through NASA's Pleiades supercomputer, it revealed the structure of the cloud's interior, which resembles the spiral disk of the Milky Way. According to the model, the arms of this inner Oort cloud extend 15,000 AU from end to end.

To confirm this structure through observations, researchers will need to directly track objects or isolate light reflected from all other background and foreground sources.

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