The Oort cloud is a shell of icy bodies that surrounds the solar system. Many comets that frequent our inner solar system originate from this distant region.

Imagine waking up one morning to the news: a black hole is drifting close to our solar system. It sounds like the plot of a .

The Oort cloud, if it indeed exists, likely isn’t unique to our own solar system. Correa Otto says that some astronomers believe these clouds exist around many solar systems.

“It’s completely plausible for our solar system to have captured such an Oort cloud planet,” says Nathan Kaib, a co-author on the new work and an astronomer at the Planetary Science Institute.

The monstrous 85-mile-wide comet C/2014 UN271 is the second most distant body originating from the Oort Cloud found to be chemically active.

The Oort cloud is thought to be a remnant of the solar system’s formation, a shell of icy debris left over from the chaotic birth of planets 4.6 billion years ago. As Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus ...

Credit: NASA/JPL ()Chaos reigns 50,000 AU from Earth (1 AU is the distance between Earth and the Sun). At this icy distance, in the cold recesses of our solar system, we find the Oort cloud.

You’ll find it in every astronomy textbook: the spherical cloud of a trillion lumps of rock and ice that forms the outermost boundary of our solar system.The Oort cloud’s distant edge could ...

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 ...

Astronomers searching for the faintest glimmers of light beyond distant Pluto say they’ve discovered a new dwarf planet – and that this planetoid’s movements hint that an invisible giant ...

As such, it seems the Oort cloud is more of a shell or bubble around our solar system than a disk like the Kuiper Belt. These long-period comets include C/2013 A1 Siding Spring, which passed close to ...