The Oort cloud, posted in 1950 by Dutch astronaut Jan Oort, defines the periphery of the solar system – extending beyond 100,000 times the Earth’s solar eclipse. There are billions of frozen rocks larger than Manhattan Island, like bricks left over from the solar system’s planet-building process. The Oort objects on orbits approaching the sun appear as long-lived comets when their ice evolves by heating from sunlight. One of the great long-running comets may have collapsed 66 million years ago, taking out the Chicxulub-powered machine that killed the dinosaurs.
The outer limit of the Oort cloud reaches half way to the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri. So, if other stars possess Oort – like clouds, these clouds rub against each other like clusters of dense billiard balls.
Because the farthest rocks are quickly attached to their parent star, they can be moved into an inter-tree space with the gravity of a passing star. These objects possess the motion of their parent star relative to the local resting rate (LSR) because their initial orbital distance is around the small star. So it was surprising to find that the first intersex thing discovered, ‘Oumuamua, was almost at rest in the LSR – with only one in 500 stars stopping there.
Despite early attempts to connect Oumuamua to an original star, it is inconvenient to do so for intersex objects because a line of sight in any direction on the sky includes several Oort clouds that which fills the size of the Sweet Trail. The other surprise from Oumuamua’s discovery in 2017 is that the expected abundance of interspecific rocks lost from Oort’s cloud analogs is too small with orders of magnitude greater than the value needed to explain its. make the population of Oumuamua-like objects. The nurseries that give birth to Oumuamua-like objects must be different from what we know about the solar system.
Recently, Alan Jackson and Steven Desch ‘suggested that Oumuamua may be a nitrogen-fixing iceberg. This represents a rare, never-before-seen phenomenon among several organizations within our own Oort cloud. If the first interspecific object ever discovered is made of real nitrogen, that would mean that such a nitrogen iceberg is common. In general, nitrogen is extracted along with carbon through the carbon-nitrogen-oxygen, or CNO, cycling in stellar interiors. The Spitzer Space Telescope placed tight limits on the presence of carbon-based molecules near Oumuamua, strengthening constraints since there were no (okay?) Visible signs of sunlight reflected from a silver tail. the movement exhibited by Oumuamua from an orbit shaped by the pressure of the sun, about one-tenth of its mass had to evaporate based on the conservation of momentum. caused a tremor, far beyond the observed boundaries.In addition, a nitrogen iceberg would have possessed the movement of its birth star, unlike ‘Oumuamua, which originated from the rest of the local.
Long areas of Oort cloud are not protected from explosion by interspecific particles. The density of the protective solar wind decreases abruptly with a square distance, and the wind is stopped by the interstellar medium at a speed that is about 100 times the separation of the Earth’s sun. This stopping point, known as the heliopause, is still about 1,000 times smaller than the Oort cloud level. In a paper I recently wrote with Merav Opher, James Drake and Gabor Toth, we showed that the heliopause is shaped like a puffy croissant that is almost round. Externally, the Oort cloud products are exposed to the same environment as intersex objects, unprotected from damage to their surface by the influence of energetic cosmic rays, dust or interstellar gas particles.
How did the Oort cloud form outside? One opportunity was suggested in a recent paper by my student Amir Siraj, who showed that the companion of a temporary couple to the sun in his birth star group, could have captured the crowd seen. of Oort cloud objects out of the browser environment. This process could also lead to a possible explanation of distant planets, such as the hypothetical planet Nine.
But a more interesting real achievement is that most items within the Oort cloud scale may not be connected to the sun. In another paper by Amir, we showed that the recent discovery of the interstellar comet 2I / Borisov, most likely from the Oort cloud around another star, suggests that interspecific objects may be more than solar system items inside our own Oort cloud. In other words, the sun – bound Oort cloud products are swimming in an ocean of intersecting and evolving interstellar backdrops. Moreover, the discovery of 2I / Borisov means that about a percentage of the carbon and oxygen in the Milky Way galaxy could be trapped in intersex objects.
Interspecific objects range from dust particles up to the size of planets. Cosmic dust has been known to exist in an interstellar space for more than a century, contributing to the dust of the solar system – known as visible sunlight, which is seen as zodiacal light. Planets with free navigation have recently been identified by the Optical Gravitational Lensing Experiment (OGLE), which has discovered several such planets through the influence of a gravitational lens on the brightness of back stars.
All in all, the Military Trail seems to be full of objects, some tied to their parent stars but mostly sailing through intersex space. Examining free flowers while crossing our backyard in the solar system will save us from the need to visit their birth sites, which would require very long trips. With the chemical rockets we already have, it would take about a tenth of the age of the Earth to reach the middle of the Milky Way.
Interestingly, the recent discovery of interspecific material allows the study of “bottles” among the rocks that reach the shores of the solar system. There may be important messages from other civilizations out there. Quoting Immanuel Kant from his book Critique of Pure Reason, “If it were possible to reconcile with any kind of knowledge that at least some of the planets we see have inhabitants, I might bet her -everything I have on it. So I’m saying it’s not just an idea but a strong belief (on how right I would be on many benefits in my life) that there are residents in another world as well. ”