Accidental find in planetarium show could shift scientists’ understanding of our solar system
https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/10/science/oort-cloud-unseen-structure-planetarium-discovery
Accidental find in planetarium show could shift scientists’ understanding of our solar system
https://www.cnn.com/2025/06/10/science/oort-cloud-unseen-structure-planetarium-discovery
6 Comments
Every time the science changes, I shift a bit uncomfortably in my chair, and wonder, what science will change next. Science is kind of like my ex-girlfriend, and a box of chocolates. Never know what you’re gonna get, or what kind of accidental find you are going to….find.
That’s an incredible reveal. I would have doubted this plot point in a work of fiction.
Spirals/disks are at every level and every size within the known universe. It only makes sense to me that the Oort cloud would exhibit rotational motion, no matter how miniscule the gravitational force from the Sun. What WOULD surprise me is if the motion was in a different plane or in a different direction than our ecliptic.
Nonetheless, this is really cool and props to the planetarium crew for this find!
The article isn’t talking about actual data about the Oort cloud that demonstrates this structural feature in this visualization, because we have next to no data about the Oort cloud. This is a weird spiral structure in a ***simulation*** of what the Oort cloud ***might*** be like. Don’t misconstrue the discovery of one researcher’s simulation happening to show some structure with the idea that there might actually be that structure in the Oort cloud. It’ll be an interesting possibility to follow up in research – but there is, it seems, no actual evidence of a spiral structurecin the Oort Cloud as yet.
This is really a neat idea, and a model suggests it may be there. As noted in the article, however, it is just a model and we lack sufficient data (or a foreseeable way to obtain sufficient data) to confirm or disconfirm. It wouldn’t be accurate to go out and say we’ve discovered the Oort Cloud is a spiral.
It seems like everything ends up rotating into a spiral at some point. This makes more sense than a massive cloud of rocks and ice.