Spirals are a repeating theme in astronomy, with arguably the most famous example of a swirling armed structure being our home galaxy, the Milky Way. Now, using a powerful NASA supercomputer called "Pleiades," scientists have discovered yet another spiral structure on the edge of our solar system.
The spiral is composed of billions of icy bodies surrounded by a shell of comets called the Oort cloud. Even though the Oort cloud lurks at the edge of our own planetary system and is about 99,000 times as wide as the distance between Earth and the sun, scientists have thus far been in the dark about the structure of the Oort cloud. These new findings, however, give researchers an important clue about the object.
"We found that some comets in the inner Oort cloud found between 1,000 au to 10,000 au, form a long-lasting spiral structure," Luke Dones, study team member and principal scientist at the Southwest Research Institute, told Space.com. (The measurement "au" stands for "astronomical unit," and one au is equal to the distance between Earth and the sun.)
