Entire Solar System

Voyager 1 & Voyager 2
crossing our entire solar system

Dutch astronomer Jan Oort proposed in 1950, that certain comets come from a vast, extremely distant, spherical shell of icy bodies surrounding the solar system. This giant swarm of objects is now named the Oort Cloud, occupying space at a distance of 5,000 – 100,000 Astronomical Units (AU).

One Astronomical Unit (AU), is the distance between earth and our sun, ≈150 million km. The Cloud’s outer extent appears to be in the region of space where the sun’s gravity pull is weaker than the pull of nearby stars.

The Oort Cloud contains up to 2 trillion icy bodies in solar orbit. Occasionally, stars passing nearby, or tidal interactions with the Milky Way’s disc disturb the orbits of some of these bodies of this Cloud. This may cause the object to fall into the inner solar system as a so-called long-period comet.

These comets have very large, eccentric orbits and take thousands of years to circle the sun. They have been observed in the inner solar system and recorded only once.

Short-period comets take less than 200 years to orbit the sun and they travel mostly in the plane in which most of the planets orbit. They are presumed to come from a disc-shaped region beyond Neptune called the Kuiper Belt, named after the Dutch astronomer Gerard Kuiper.

The Kuiper Belt extends from about 30 – 55 AU and seems to be populated with hundreds of thousands of icy bodies larger than 100 km plus over a trillion comets.

The objects in the Oort Cloud and in the Kuiper Belt are presumed to be remnants from the formation of our solar system about 4.6 billion years ago.

“The Music of the Spheres ….”

Our flaming & blazing Star
singing and dancing

Pressure and gravity waves generated deep inside the Sun create sounds and rhythms that cause the magnetic fields of its planets’ atmosphere and terrestrial systems to sing-along (resonate) with, like a plucked guitar string.

These “sing-along” dance tones are distinct and isolated. The solar blasts send acoustic waves to the ‘loops’ at tens of kms/sec. These loops are up to 100 million kms long. They guide waves and oscillations in a way similar to a pipe organ!

The Orion Nebula is the nearest massive star formation. It is ≈ 24 light years across. It’s mass is ≈ 2000 times the mass of the Sun. It is the most intensely studied celestial region.

The nebula has revealed the process of how stars and their planetary systems are formed from collapsing clouds of gas and dust. Astronomers directly observed proto-planetary disks, brown dwarfs, intense and turbulent motions of gas, and the photo-ionizing effects of massive nearby stars.

There are also supersonic “bullets” of gas piercing the hydrogen clouds of the Orion Nebula. Each bullet is tipped with iron atoms glowing bright blue.