The human mind may find it difficult to conceptualize: a cosmic cloud so colossal it surrounds the Sun and eight planets as it extends trillions of miles into deep space. The spherical shell known as ...

The Oort Cloud, an expanse of icy bodies in the far reaches of our solar system, is shown here in a scene from "Encounters in the Milky Way," a show at New York City's Hayden Planetarium that spawned ...

Forget what you learned in school. The solar system isn't just a flat disc of planets it's a 3D bubble moving through space.

Could a comet’s tail rewrite what we know about interstellar visitors? That question is now front and center after NASA’s November 5, 2025, observations of 3I/ATLAS revealed a tail structure unlike ...

The human mind may find it difficult to conceptualize a cosmic cloud so colossal it surrounds the Sun and eight planets as it extends trillions of miles into deep space. The spherical shell known as ...

Discover the secrets of the Oort Cloud: astronomers unveil a comet from the inner Oort Cloud with hints about solar system formation. Astronomers have spotted an icy object near Neptune that they say ...

The Oort cloud is a region in our solar system's vicinity we don’t know all that much about. Named after Dutch astronomer Jan Oort, it is a theoretical concept comprising planetesimals (solid objects ...

Like the newly-identified 2014 UN271, the NEOWISE comet pictured here is a long-period comet originating in the Oort Cloud. Photo by NASA Johnson via Flickr under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Amateur astronomers, ...

Here, we show that the detection of Borisov implies that interstellar objects outnumber Solar system objects in the Oort cloud, whereas the reverse is true near the Sun due to the stronger ...

Rocky fireballs like the one that fell over Alberta, Canada last year shouldn't originate from the icy Oort Cloud... but this one apparently did. When you purchase through links on our site, we may ...

The Oort cloud is believed to be a potential source of meteorites that fall to Earth. During the planet formation process, smaller objects — including asteroids and comets — were drawn to the outer ...

Ernest Opik, an Estonian astronomer based at the Astronomical Observatory in Tartu from 1921-1944, commenced research on the frequencies and speeds of meteors and comets in the 1920s. In 1932, Opik ...