The Oort Cloud: The Solar System's Disaster Factory | Answers With Joe
发布时间 2019-02-11 13:30:02 来源
摘要
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The Oort Cloud is a vast field of icy objects far outside the planets and asteroids of our solar system, and it's the birthplace of some of the most mysterious objects in space - comets.
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Comets have always held a special place for us. For hundreds of thousands of years, humans looked to the stars and found their gods, their mythologies, and their beliefs. So when an unusual object appeared overhead like a comet, that was considered a harbinger of doom.
Over time, we learned our place in the solar system and the universe and understood that comets were just icy objects in extremely long, elliptical orbits around the sun. But the question of where these came from always eluded us.
Edmund Halley was the first to make this distinction with the comet that now bears his name.
But it wasn't until Jan Oort in 1950, who proposed the idea that there must be a vast cloud of comets just outside the gravity well of the solar system that we finally understood where these comets came from.
Today, astronomers are looking for proof of this cloud, not just around our star, but around other stars as well. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope in Chile might be able to spot these when it comes on line in 2021.
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