THE OFFICIAL NEWSLETTER OF

SPACE TECHNOLOGY STUDENTS’ SOCIETY

KALPANA CHAWLA SPACE TECHNOLOGY CELL

IIT KHARAGPUR
January, 2010
05

W e've all wondered at some The Solar system is surrounded by a giant hypothesized
point in our lives about the cometary sphere known as 'Oort Cloud' made up of rocks
mysteries our Solar System
holds. After all, the eight planets (plus Pluto
and all those other dwarf planets) orbit
and ice believed to be ejected out of the inner solar system
by encounter with Uranus and Neptune. But there are
problems with the Oort cloud, the greatest being that
within a very small volume of the
there is absolutely no evidence that it even exists!
heliosphere (the volume of space
dominated by the influence of the Sun), further from it than the Earth. Astronomers think
what's going on in the rest of the volume. As we that the gravity of an occasional passing star or
push more robots into space, improve our other object, or possibly a galactic tide, causes
observational capabilities and begin to experience comets from the Oort cloud to fall into the inner
space for ourselves, we solar system, just as the
learn more and more about Moon's tidal force bends and
the nature of where we deforms the Earth's oceans,
come from and how the causing the tides to rise and
planets have evolved. But fall. This mechanism
even with our advancing supposedly supplies the
knowledge, we would be influx of comets needed to
naive to think we have all overcome the conclusion that
the answers, so much still the solar system is young.
needs to be uncovered. Besides the galactic tide, the
Oort Cloud is one perplexing main trigger for sending
conundrum; our Solar comets into the inner Solar
System has thrown at us. System is believed to be
interaction between the Sun's
The Oort Cloud is thought to comprise of two
Oort Cloud and the gravitational fields of near-by
separate regions: a spherical outer Oort Cloud and a
stars or giant molecular clouds. The orbit of the Sun
disc-shaped inner Oort Cloud, or Hills cloud. The
through the plane of the Milky Way sometimes
outer Oort Cloud is weakly bounded to the Sun and
brings it in relatively close proximity to other stellar
is the home of the long-period comets, containing
systems.
several trillion individual objects larger than
approximately 1 km, with neighbouring objects There are problems with the Oort cloud, the
typically tens of millions of kilometres apart. The greatest being that there is absolutely no evidence
existence of the inner cloud predicts tens or that it even exists! At least with the Kuiper Belt, we
hundreds of times more cometary nuclei as the can observe the large KBOs (Kuiper Belt Objects)and
outer cloud. we know where it is, but the Oort Cloud is too far
away (if it really is out there). Firstly, the Oort cloud
They may have started forming at the same time as
is predicted to be over 50,000 AU from the Sun
the Sun, approximately 4.3 billion years before,
(that's nearly a light year away), making it about
during the Solar System's formation. The
25% of the way toward our nearest stellar
gravitational interaction with young gas giant
neighbour, Proxima Centauri. If the solar system is
planets such as Jupiter ejected the objects into
much younger than most astronomers think, then
extremely long elliptic or parabolic orbits and sent in
there is no need for the Oort comet cloud. Since it
all directions, making the Oort cloud ball shaped
cannot be detected, the Oort cloud is not a scientific
instead of disk shaped.
concept. This is not bad science, but non-science
The Oort cloud supposedly contains billions of
masquerading as science.
comet nuclei orbiting the sun thousands of times