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Physics has helped us discover countless facts throughout history, one of those impressive facts is our topic today, we will talk about the "Oort cloud"
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The Oort cloud is a hypothetical set of asteroids and different astronomical bodies that lie beyond the far end of our solar system.
In 1950 the Dutch astronomer Jan Oort, based on careful orbital studies and statistical analyzes of the trajectories of comets, formulated a hypothesis according to which the nuclei of long-period comets come from a spherical cloud that surrounds the solar system beyond the orbit of Pluto, from about 30,000 astronomical units to about 3 years light.
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Jan Hendrik Oort was born in Franeker, Friesland in the year 1900, with only 27 years old he proved that the Milky Way was rotating, this was achieved by analyzing the movement of the stars. At 35 he got the position of professor at the University of Leiden.
After the Second World War the Dutchman became a pioneer in the field of radio astronomy, it was Oort who discovered that we are 30,000 years light from the center of our galaxy, already in the year 1950 suggested the existence of a region of the solar system where the comets came from... The Oort Cloud.
Here is an example with the Comet C/2017 K2. Source here
The objects that make up this cloud would have been formed in the first phases of accretion of the Solar System in the vicinity of the Sun, but would have been expelled towards its confines by the effect of the forces of gravity. Those who did not fully escape these would have formed the Oort cloud.
Some of the objects of this cloud, because of the iteration with a nearby star, would be pushed from time to time in the direction of the Sun, towards which they would travel in a journey of hundreds of thousands of years until they began to alter their orbit by the effect of the gravity of the great planets Jupiter and Saturn, so that some are transformed into long-period comets, although others after their passage through the nearby Solar System can be lost forever in outer space.
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It is estimated, without having data to corroborate these hypotheses, that there exist in the Oort cloud more than a trillion objects of small diameter, whose total mass can be equivalent to that of the planet Jupiter.
This was my post today, without a doubt this is one of the most interesting topics on which I have read and that is why I decided to share it with you, have a good life, until then community!
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