Space: Who Knew, #6

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Comets come from the Oort Cloud

If you were to hitch a ride on umm, light... and if you were to travel for a full year, might you witness comets within this strange place?

Called the Oort Cloud (named after a Dutch astronomer, Jan Hendrik Oort), this region marks the outer most boundaries of our solar system. It is here where astronomers believe comets come from. Check out the wiki:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oort_cloud

So, how big is this cloud- how massive?

"The outer Oort cloud is believed to contain several trillion individual comet nuclei larger than approximately 1.3 km^[1] (about 500 billion with absolute magnitudes^[12] brighter than 10.9), with neighboring comets typically tens of millions of kilometers apart.^[2][13] Its total mass is not known with certainty, but, assuming that Halley's comet is a suitable prototype for all comets within the outer Oort cloud, the estimated combined mass is 3x10²⁸ grams, or roughly five times the mass of the Earth.^[1][14] Earlier it was thought to be more massive (up to 380 Earth masses),^[15] but improved knowledge of the size distribution of long-period comets has led to much lower estimates. The mass of the inner Oort cloud is not currently known."

Why did I not learn this stuff in school???


Who knew???