NASA supercomputer discovers mysterious spiral structure at the edge of our solar system

Space is a great unknown even to experts on the subject, and even if they know certain aspects of it, the truth is that they can easily be surprised with a new discovery. An example of this is the mysterious Oort cloud, which is the origin of many of the comets in our solar system, but astronomers still do not know what it looks like, however, now, new simulations made by NASA's supercomputer may have given them their first glimpse.

New research suggests that the Oort cloud, that mysterious sphere of icy objects at the outer reaches of the solar system, may possess a pair of spiral arms, resembling a miniature galaxy . The exact shape of the Oort cloud and how forces outside the solar system affect it have long been a mystery.

Now, a new model developed by researchers suggests that the internal structure of the Oort cloud could be shaped like a spiral disk. These findings were published on February 16 on the preprint server arXiv, meaning they have not yet been peer-reviewed.

The Oort Cloud originated from the unused remnants of the solar system's giant planets (Jupiter, Neptune, Uranus, and Saturn) after their formation 4.6 billion years ago. Some of these remnants are so large that they could be considered dwarf planets. As these planets began to orbit the sun, their movements expelled the excess material far beyond the orbit of Pluto, where they currently reside.

This cloud is extremely distant – for example, it will take NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft 300 years to reach the Oort cloud and another 300,000 years to leave it. This means that the bodies in the cloud are too small, too faint, and too slowly moving to be directly imaged by even the most powerful telescopes.

Most of our evidence comes from long-period comets, "snowballs" of ice and dust ejected from the cloud to orbit the sun by gravitational perturbations. To better understand what the Oort cloud might be like, the researchers behind the new study used information from comet orbits and gravitational forces inside and outside our solar system to build a model of the Oort cloud's structure.

When scientists ran this model on NASA’s Pleiades supercomputer, it yielded a structure for the inner part of the cloud that resembles the Milky Way’s spiral disk . To confirm this structure through observations, researchers will need to either track the objects directly or distinguish the reflected light from them from all other background and foreground sources . Both are incredibly difficult tasks that have yet to receive dedicated resources.

But researchers believe that if we want to understand where comets come from, how our solar system evolved and the cloud's ongoing impact on our cosmic neighborhood, it might be a good idea to start looking.