CNN
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Accidental discoveries may change the way we think about one of the most mystical structures in our solar system.
Auto-clouds, a large spread of ice bodies rotating around the Sun at a distance of 1,000 times the distance from Neptune’s orbit, are widely considered spherical, but have never been directly observed.
However, during the pre-introduction of a show entitled “Meeting on Milky Way,” which debuted Monday at the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, the projection at the planetarium’s dome revealed something strange in the clouds of Oart: the Spiral.
In September, the curators were testing a scene that included detailed views of Earth’s celestial neighbourhood, from the sun to the outer edge of the solar system.
“We played on the scene and we saw it right away. It was just there,” recalls Jackie Faherty, an astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History and curator of the show. “I was confused and thought it was very strange. I didn’t know if it was an artifact or not.”
For the investigation, Faherty contacted David Nessvolny, an institute scientist at the Southwest Institute in Boulder, Colorado, with experts at OORT Cloud who provided field science data.
“We didn’t create it — David did,” Fahhty said. “This is David’s simulation, it’s based on physics. There’s a perfectly good physical explanation of why it should be there.”
Initially, Nezvorny suspected artifacts (anomalies or distortions in the visualization of the data), but when he looked at the data, he confirmed the presence of the spiral and eventually published a scientific paper on the discovery in the Journal of Astrophysics in April. “It’s a strange way to discover things,” he said. “You need to know your data better for years.”
The existence of Oart Cloud was first proposed in 1950 by Dutch astronomer Jan Oust. He imagined it as an ice-like body shell swirling around the sun from 1.5 light years. According to NASA, clouds are the farthest regions of the solar system, stretching halfway through the next star.
It consisted of leftovers from the production of our solar system, scattered in all directions after the planet formed. In other words, while many of the ice bodies within the OORT Cloud do not share the same orbital plane as the solar system itself, they move in a variety of trends, Oort Cloud is depicted as a sphere. If one of those frozen bodies is thrown inward towards the sun, heat will evaporate some of the body’s material and begin to form a tail – and what we call comets.
“Sometimes, some of these ice bodies come into the inner solar system and you can see the orbits where they are turned on,” Faherty said. “And they’re on these really crazy, long orbits. It can take millions of years to go around the sun, and when they come, they help you realize how far they are.”
The problem trying to imagine what Ortcloud might look like is that even if scientists are technically surrounded, they have never seen it. This is because the body that makes up it is small and has a diameter of less than 60 miles (97 km).
Spirals were hidden in Nessvolny’s data, as they had never thought of visualizing them in three dimensions. “I’ve never seen it in Cartesian coordinates, and there was no good reason to do so,” he said. “But once you do it, it’s obvious. It’s there.”
To confirm the findings, Nesvorny ran a simulation that took weeks to complete using NASA’s Pleiades supercomputer, one of the world’s most powerful computers.
“I thought maybe this particular simulation (I gave the planetarium) shows it, and all other simulations with other stars, other parameters, don’t show it. In that case, it wouldn’t be that interesting,” he said. “But every simulation, every model I have, shows a spiral.”
The reason there is that the Oort Cloud objects are well distanced from the solar gravity, and are beginning to be influenced by the galaxy tides – the gravitational fields of the galaxy and the dark matter within them. This field acts on the small body of Orti Clouds and comets by twisting the orbital plane and creating a helix.
The spiral Nezvolty added is in the inner part of the Autocloud that is closest to us, and he still believes the outer part is spherical or shell-shaped.
The Vera C. Rubin Observatory, a powerful telescope recently brought online in Chile, allows you to offer your hands by discovering and observing individual ice bodies in the clouds. But according to Nessvolny, the telescope will likely discover dozens of these bodies.
Spiral theory, according to Faherty, can help illuminate the dynamics of the solar system. “If you come up with a theory about how the solar system evolves, you should take into account the types of shapes you may have in those structures,” she said. “Maybe comets have helped to deliver water to Earth. Maybe the components of life may be in the Oort Clouds, so if you want to talk about the potential blocks of life surrounding our solar system, you need to understand its shape.”
She added that it is a “dream” to allow science to be presented recently in shows aimed at the public. “I really believe that the planetarium, the dome itself, is a research tool,” Faherty said. “I want to say this is a science that you haven’t had time to reach your textbooks yet.”
The discovery of the spiral is a great example of learning through visualising the universe in new ways.
“The results reshape our spiritual image of our home solar system and also provide a new sense of what the auto clouds in the ext-solar system look like,” Rice added. “We connect our solar system models with what we know about the wider galaxy and place them in context as a dynamic system. We are not static and not isolated. The solar system is shaped by a wider ecosystem, and the OORT spiral illustrates that.”
Although interesting, the paper is almost completely theoretical, as it is based on numerical simulations of the interaction of the solar gravity and the gravitational pull of the movement of the rest of the Milky Way galaxy, said Edward Gomez, an astrophysicist and honorary lecturer at Cardiff University in the UK. He was also not involved in this study.
“Comets over a long period enter the inner solar system at various angles. The authors try to model using the idea of a spiral arm,” Gomez said in an email. “What they’re proposing may be true, but it could also be modeled by OORT cloud or other shapes of physical processes. The way to test this is because only a handful of potential OORT cloud objects are known.”
Reviewing the findings will be a challenge, said Simon Portesys Zwort, a professor of Numerical Star Dynamics at Leiden University in the Netherlands, noting that he was not part of the team behind the study. “It’s interesting that they found the spiral (but) it doesn’t seem like we’ll see it in the near future,” he said.
Luckily, Vera Rubin Observatory detects hundreds of inner OORt cloud objects, but the spiral is only visible if more people are discovered.