The Oort Cloud facts, evidence, location, distance and is there be a planet hiding there

Location and Distance

There are believed to be two Oort clouds that surround our solar system. The original location was thought to be about one light-year from Earth. The two Oort Clouds are:-

• The Inner Oort Cloud is believed to be outside the orbit of Pluto and contains the Kuiper-Belt Object Sedna.
• · Distance to the Outer Oort Cloud is estimated to be 1 Light Year from the Earth or about 5.88 trillion miles away or 50,000 A.U. 1 A.U. is the distance between our planet, Earth and the Sun.

To put some more context into the description, the next nearest star Proxima Centauri is four times further away than the Oort Cloud. There has been no definitive evidence that the Oort Cloud exists. A debate is raging about whether Sedna, the so-called "Tenth planet", is part of an inner Oort Cloud. The argument is because the Sedna is three times further away from the Sun than Pluto, well beyond where the kuiper belt is said to be located. Sedna is not the only object believed to be part of the Inner Oort Cloud. In 2012, VP113 was discovered in the same space region as Sedna. Ref: Carnegie Science

Oort Cloud objects are too far away for our telescopes on Earth to see any of these objects, plus you also need to consider the fact that they are tiny. Thousands upon millions of comets are believed to be "holding up" in the Oort Cloud, waiting to be sent on a journey to the Sun. They are not clustered in one area of the galaxy but surround the entire Solar System like a cloud. No one has ever seen the Oort Cloud, so no one knows how big and far it stretches out from its location. Comets are quite small, so you're not going to be able to see one a light-year away.

The Oort Cloud will be big. It surrounds the Solar System at its perceived distance. How deep the Oort Cloud is an unknown amount. It is unlikely to be a mass of comets equivalent to asteroids in Star Wars V - The Empire Strikes Back.

Travel to Oort Cloud

Voyager 1 is the furthest any space probe has ever reached from Earth. When writing, Voyager 1 was 20,606,155,702 km from Earth, or 137 times the distance from Earth to the Sun. N.A.S.A. have produced a page that will show you in real-time how far each voyager space probe has travelled.

Voyager I is expected to reach the Oort Cloud about 300 years from now. The probe must navigate the Oort Cloud to reach the other side. The probe wouldn't exit the Oort Cloud for another maybe 30,000 years.

If we had technology that enabled us to travel at the speed of light. It would take the spaceship a year to get to the Oort Cloud. If we had Warp Speed, it'd be faster. We can dream of Star Trek technology.

Oort Cloud Planet

There are believed to be two Oort Clouds, an Inner and an Outer. The Outer Oort Cloud would be at a distance theorised by Jan Hendrik Oort since the Inner one would be after the Kuiper Belt ended.

A theory is being tested that there could be a planet orbiting the Sun at a distance that would match the distance that the Inner Oort Cloud is. The planet is about ten times the mass of the Earth and orbits the Sun every 20,000 years.

There is evidence that at one time, we might have had a ninth planet which existed between Saturn and Uranus but was catapulted out. The missing planet could be found existing in the Oort Cloud. The planet would be so far away and too dark to be spotted. IB Times.

At such a distance, it will be hard to spot anything in the Oort Cloud because it won't have light reflecting off it, and our telescopes aren't possibly powerful enough to spot it. The planet might be at the farthest point, so it will be tough to see now. If it interacts with something else, we may see it, maybe block something out.

The Oort Cloud planet is only a theory now. Neptune was first theorised, and its position was calculated before it was discovered, so there's no reason why the same can't hold for this new planet.

The evidence for the new planet is based on the orbits of other far-out objects such as Sedna. All the far-off objects are orbiting in the same direction as the diagram demonstrates. The reason for that is believed to be a massive object in the other direction. Ref: Space.

There could be no planet out there, but then they'd have to come up with a reason why all the far-off objects they've seen are all in one direction. Some objects go in the "void" area, but far fewer than in the other direction.

If you're interested in being the first to find it, Mike Brown believes the planet is currently in the area of sky populated by the constellations of Taurus and Orion. Daily Star

Oort Cloud Evidence

We have no real evidence that the Oort Cloud exists. We only speculate because of comets as we have no images or pictures of the Oort Cloud because it is so far away that it is only hypothesised. All pictures of the Oort Cloud are artists' impressions, including mine.

The evidence that we do have is in observations of the paths of comets. Comets that come to us need a source. That source would be the Oort Cloud. New Scientist. Some are theorized to have come from another Solar System such as Oumuamua. New York Times

The Oort Cloud objects are so small that no telescopes can spot them. The only pictures are the artist's impressions and illustrations. We have no satellite or space probes out that way and none with a high enough camera resolution to pick them up. Such an object would take thousands of years to get to as we don't have faster than light yet, that is if that is possible.

Jan Hendrik Oort

The Oort Cloud is named after Jan Hendrik Oort (Apr 28, 1900 - Nov 5, 1992), who predicted them where they are widely believed to be nowadays. Before Oort, Ernst Opik, 1932 an Estonian Astronomer, had placed the Cloud just outside the solar system. The Oort Cloud is sometimes known as the Opik-Ort Cloud in recognition of the earlier hypothesis. Oort bases his cloud theory on:-

• No comet's path has been calculated to indicate as coming from interstellar space.
• All comets so far seen don't all seem to be coming from the one point in space.
• There is a strong belief that many comet's furthest point from the Sun lies around 50,000 A.U., roughly 1 Light Year or 50,000 times the distance between Earth and the Sun.

Apart from being associated with the Oort Cloud, Jan also calculated that the centre of the Milky Way is 30,000 light-years away in the direction of the Sagittarius constellation. The pictures below show the furthest anything from Earth that has ever travelled (Voyager 1), the location of Sedna, the area where the Oort Cloud is, and the nearest star. The sizes aren't to scale, but their main purpose is to indicate where things are. It should be emphasised that the Oort Cloud is a line. It encompasses the entire solar system like a bubble with the Earth and Sun in the middle.

Oort Cloud Creation

The Oort Cloud is believed to have been created five billion years ago when a nebula exploded, creating the Sun and its planets. The intense gravitational strength of Jupiter is said to have pushed them to the outer regions of space. Ref: Harvard

Nemesis, Brown Dwarf

There is a theory in addition to the Oort Cloud that there is a brown dwarf star called Nemesis that interferes with the Oort Cloud, sending comets this way. The idea for Nemesis is based on the perceived cycle of mass extinctions in the geological record, which seems to occur more often at intervals of 26 million years. ref:Daily Mail.

Such an object, such as a brown dwarf star, would have given off enough radiation that it would have been detected by Earth-based instruments, which none have been recorded. Nemesis might still exist but might be different from a brown star. With Nemesis being a brown dwarf, it is hard to spot, so we can't see it because it gives off no heat and is too far from the Earth to reflect light. If it were a yellow dwarf, maybe we'd see the light from it and know it's here. The closest so far discovered brown dwarf is called WISE 0855-0714 and was discovered in the constellation of Hydra. Wise is about 7.53 light-years away, further out than the Oort Cloud. Ref:Space

Other Oort Clouds?

Our star is not unique, special, and small compared to other stars such as Rigel. There's no reason why if the Oort Cloud does exist around our Sun, there shouldn't be any reason why the Oort Cloud shouldn't exist around any other star. It's only speculative as we still have no confirmed proof/evidence that such a cloud exists surrounding our solar system. We may never know unless we gain the technology to travel at the speed of light. If we could travel at the speed of light, it would take a round trip of two years to discover and report that it existed. It would take a year to get there and a year to return.

Asteroids, Kuiper Belt vs the Oort Cloud

The main difference between the three is location. The Asteroid Belt is located between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. Asteroids in the Asteroid Belt are believed to have been parts of a planet that didn't form because of the immense gravity of Jupiter. Asteroids are small rocky planetoids. In recent years, Ceres, a near-spherical planetoid, was elevated to dwarf planet status by the International Astronomical Union, the world's governing body for all things space.

At the solar system's edge, beyond the planet Neptune, is the Kuiper Belt, which contains many asteroids. The dwarf planet Pluto is in this region of space. Pluto used to be known as a planet but was downgraded when other objects, such as Eris, were found in the outer Solar System and were deemed larger than Pluto.

The Asteroid Belt and Kuiper Belt have been verified to exist, whereas the Oort Cloud is just a theory. The Asteroid Belt and the Kuiper Belt both consist of asteroids and dwarf planets, whereas the Oort Cloud is said to consist of comets, the dirty snowballs. This is not to say that the Oort Cloud doesn't contain asteroids. It's just that the theory consists mainly of comets.