Oort Cloud
January 24, 2022
Sometimes there are areas or things in space that just blow our minds. Have you heard of the Oort Cloud before? It is the most distant object in our solar system. It’s further than even Pluto. It is named after the first person to postulate about its existence, a Dutch astronomer named Jan Oort.
1 Astronomical Unit (AU) is the distance from our sun to Earth. Pluto’s distance from us goes from between 30-50 AU. The Oort Cloud is thought to start between 2,000-5,000 AU away with the outer edge being somewhere between 10,000 – 100,000 AU. That is far away.
NASA describes it as “like a big, thick-walled bubble made of icy pieces of space debris the sizes of mountains and sometimes larger. The Oort Cloud might contain billions, or even trillions, of objects.” Another pretty wild thing to think about is that it is a theoretical area. It lies beyond the heliosphere and is in interstellar space.
If you have time to try to wrap your mind around the Oort Cloud, we highly recommend it. If you happen to be a scientist that understands this concept more than us, let’s hang out.
Sources:
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/solar-system/oort-cloud/in-depth/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oort_cloud
