NASA Supercomputer Detects A Disturbing Spiral In The Solar System. What's Going On?

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The NASA boffins in white coats and thick-rimmed glasses have detected new signals that show the Oort cloud - the spooky shell of icy objects at the very edge of our solar system - might have spiralling arms that resemble a galaxy.

Proposed in 1950 by the Dutch astronomer Jan Oort , the cloud sits between 2,000 and 200,000 AU (Astronomical units) For reference, 1 AU is the average distance from the Earth to the Sun: 93 million miles or 150 million kilometres .

It's largely believed that Oort cloud came into being as the unused remnants of the creation of Jupiter, Neptune, Uranus and Saturn , around 4.6 billion years ago.

While studies are always ongoing, recent developments propose a model that says the inner structure of the Oort cloud may look like a spiral disk . The findings were published on February 16 on the preprint server arXiv , meaning the work it yet to be peer-reviewed - a crucial step in any scientific experiment.

In their experiment, researchers tried to look at the gravitational effects of objects on either side of the Oort cloud in order to build up a model of what the cloud itself could look like. However, when they ran the numbers through the NASA's Pleiades supercomputer , it came back with a mysterious structure for the inner part of the cloud that looked incredibly similar to the spiral disk of the Milky Way .

In order to confirm this structure, observations are needed, as researchers will have to track the objects directly themselves or locate the light reflected from them - both incredibly difficult tasks with little resources.

Being so far away from the Sun makes them incredibly faint ; they are (we think) merely rocks and planet-sized chunks of ice, nothing in them gives off light which would make them more photo-friendly.

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