Scientists Think They've Uncovered Mysterious Arms

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Scientists Think They've Uncovered Mysterious Arms Near the Boundary of the Solar System

Feb 27, 2025

The Oort cloud is a shell of icy objects that forms the very outskirts of our Solar System.

Recently, a group of researchers discovered that the inner portion of the Oort cloud likely has spiral arms that make it look like a galaxy.

The arms were brought into existence by “galactic tides”—gravitational forces that galaxies are able to exert on the objects inside of them.

There’s a weird quirk built into humanity’s study of the universe at large: we can see most other stellar systems and galaxies better than we can see our own, which sounds nicely profound, but it’s really just a result of the fact that it is harder to see the entirety of something from the inside than it is from the outside.

As a result, the borders of our Solar System remain a bit of a mystery to scientists, even as we develop telescopes that can see light years away and deep into the cosmic past. The epitome of that might be the Oort cloud—a truly massive shell made up of rocks and debris that forms a border of sorts around our little celestial neighborhood.

To put its location and size into perspective, the Voyager space probes (the objects that we have managed to send farthest from Earth) would need 300 years from their launch to reach the projected inner edge of the Oort cloud. To come out the other side, they would need about 30,000 years.

Outer space fantasy --
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