Latest news with #OortCloud
Yahoo
20 hours ago
- Science
- Yahoo
Astronomers discover the largest comet from the outskirts of the solar system is exploding with jets of gas
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Astronomers have discovered that the largest comet from the Oort Cloud, a shell of icy bodies at the very edge of the solar system, is bursting with chemical the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile, the team discovered that C/2014 UN271, an 85-mile-wide (137 km) body around 10 times the size of the average comet and also known as Bernardinelli-Bernstein, is erupting with complex and evolving jets of carbon monoxide gas. Now located halfway between the sun and the solar system's furthest planet, Neptune (or 16.6 times the distance between the Earth and our star), C/2014 UN271 becomes the second-most distant comet originating from the Oort Cloud that has been seen to be chemically active. The observations are also the first direct evidence of what drives cometary activity when these icy bodies are far from the sun. "These measurements give us a look at how this enormous, icy world works," team leader and NASA Goddard Space Flight Center researcher Nathan Roth said in a statement. "We're seeing explosive outgassing patterns that raise new questions about how this comet will evolve as it continues its journey toward the inner solar system." ALMA was able to observe C/2014 UN271 despite its distance from the sun via the carbon monoxide in its atmosphere and its thermal emissions. Previously, the sensitivity of this ground-breaking instrument, composed of an array of 66 radio antennas located in the Atacama Desert region of northern Chile, allowed scientists to determine the size of the core or "nucleus" of the comet. Building upon this, the team was able to precisely determine the comet's entire size and the amount of dust that envelopes its core or "nucleus." This confirmed the status of C/2014 UN271 as the largest Oort Cloud comet ever to the clearer picture painted of this giant comet by ALMA was the first detection of molecular outgassing for C/2014 UN271. This has afforded scientists a rare look at the chemistry of icy bodies from the very edge of the solar system. Related Stories: — The sun is a 'runaway world collector' that can trap passing rogue planets — The solar system is teeming with 1 million 'alien invaders' from Alpha Centauri — Watch asteroid 2024 YR4 zoom harmlessly through space after risk of hitting Earth falls to near zero (video) C/2014 UN271 is approaching the sun, and as it does, the comet will begin to heat up, and more frozen material within it will turn gaseous and erupt from its icy comets are thought to be composed of unspoiled material left over from the formation of the solar system around 4.6 billion years ago, this could offer a glimpse at the conditions in which Earth and the other planets were team's research was published on June 12 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Fast Company
6 days ago
- Science
- Fast Company
How a planetarium show discovered a spiral at the edge of our solar system
If you've ever flown through outer space, at least while watching a documentary or a science fiction film, you've seen how artists turn astronomical findings into stunning visuals. But in the process of visualizing data for their latest planetarium show, a production team at New York's American Museum of Natural History made a surprising discovery of their own: a trillion-and-a-half mile long spiral of material drifting along the edge of our solar system. 'So this is a really fun thing that happened,' says Jackie Faherty, the museum's senior scientist. Last winter, Faherty and her colleagues were beneath the dome of the museum's Hayden Planetarium, fine-tuning a scene that featured the Oort cloud, the big, thick bubble surrounding our Sun and planets that's filled with ice and rock and other remnants from the solar system's infancy. The Oort cloud begins far beyond Neptune, around one and a half light years from the Sun. It has never been directly observed; its existence is inferred from the behavior of long-period comets entering the inner solar system. The cloud is so expansive that the Voyager spacecraft, our most distant probes, would need another 250 years just to reach its inner boundary; to reach the other side, they would need about 30,000 years. The 30-minute show, Encounters in the Milky Way,
Yahoo
12-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Legal status revoked, flight attendant fraud, life as an amateur golfer: Catch up on the day's stories
👋 Welcome to 5 Things PM! A man accused of falsely posing as a flight attendant so he could fly for free was convicted of fraud. Tiron Alexander claimed to have worked for seven different airlines and had booked more than 100 flights, authorities said. Here's what else you might have missed during your busy day. 1️⃣ CNN exclusive: The Department of Homeland Security told hundreds of thousands of migrants that their permission to live and work in the US had been revoked and that they should leave the country. The termination notice was sent to nationals of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela. 2️⃣ Tense times: The Los Angeles ICE raids sparked protests that have spread to other cities across the country, and more than 1,800 'No Kings' demonstrations are planned for Saturday. President Donald Trump is determined not to let that ruin his military parade. 3️⃣ Pulse memorial: Families and survivors have waited nine years for a memorial in honor of the 49 victims of the Orlando nightclub shooting. The lack of progress has been a source of frustration, but now the city is moving forward with plans. 4️⃣ 'Super weird': An accidental discovery might change how we think about one of the most mysterious structures in our solar system. A planetarium show in New York City revealed something strange within the Oort Cloud. 5️⃣ Dream come true: Golfer Justin Hastings made his major championship debut at the Masters when he was 21. Now he's competing at the US Open. Hastings explained what it's like to be an amateur at one of the sport's greatest events. 🪵 Feeling knotty: A man was seen dumping wooden boards onto the road in front of police vehicles during a high-speed chase in Ohio. His truck later caused a six-vehicle collision — but no life-threatening injuries were reported, according to the Montgomery County Sheriff's Office. • US senator forcibly removed from Noem news conference about LA protests• At least one survivor in Air India crash that killed 290 people• The FBI raided the wrong house. The Supreme Court says the family is allowed to sue 🩺 That's how many CDC employees the Department of Health and Human Services is reinstating after they were fired as part of a massive reorganization in April. 🖼️ Reviving a masterpiece: A treasured painting of Hercules and Omphale was damaged during the 2020 explosion in Beirut, and restoring it required more than three years of painstaking work. Now it's on display in Los Angeles. 💬 No regrets: The single mother of three was 'living paycheck to paycheck' in California when she decided to move to Mexico nearly 20 years ago. She says Mazatlán feels like home now. 🎵 Paul McCartney and others paid tribute to Brian Wilson, who died at age 82. Which popular group was Wilson part of? A. The DoorsB. The ByrdsC. Pink FloydD. The Beach Boys⬇️ Scroll down for the answer. 🥪 Hungry? When faced with a craving, there's hardly a country on the planet that doesn't turn to some type of bread with something stuffed inside it. To fuel your next transatlantic trip, here are 25 of the world's best sandwiches. 👋 We'll see you tomorrow. 🧠 Quiz answer: D. Brian Wilson co-founded The Beach Boys and was the creative force behind the group's surf sound.📧 Check out all of CNN's newsletters. 5 Things PM was edited and produced by CNN's Chris Good, Meghan Pryce, Kimberly Richardson and Morgan Severson.
CNN
12-06-2025
- Entertainment
- CNN
Legal status revoked, flight attendant fraud, life as an amateur golfer: Catch up on the day's stories
👋 Welcome to 5 Things PM! A man accused of falsely posing as a flight attendant so he could fly for free was convicted of fraud. Tiron Alexander claimed to have worked for seven different airlines and had booked more than 100 flights, authorities said. Here's what else you might have missed during your busy day. 1️⃣ CNN exclusive: The Department of Homeland Security told hundreds of thousands of migrants that their permission to live and work in the US had been revoked and that they should leave the country. The termination notice was sent to nationals of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela. 2️⃣ Tense times: The Los Angeles ICE raids sparked protests that have spread to other cities across the country, and more than 1,800 'No Kings' demonstrations are planned for Saturday. President Donald Trump is determined not to let that ruin his military parade. 3️⃣ Pulse memorial: Families and survivors have waited nine years for a memorial in honor of the 49 victims of the Orlando nightclub shooting. The lack of progress has been a source of frustration, but now the city is moving forward with plans. 4️⃣ 'Super weird': An accidental discovery might change how we think about one of the most mysterious structures in our solar system. A planetarium show in New York City revealed something strange within the Oort Cloud. 5️⃣ Dream come true: Golfer Justin Hastings made his major championship debut at the Masters when he was 21. Now he's competing at the US Open. Hastings explained what it's like to be an amateur at one of the sport's greatest events. Get '5 Things' in your inbox If your day doesn't start until you're up to speed on the latest headlines, then let us introduce you to your new favorite morning fix. Sign up here for the '5 Things' newsletter. 🪵 Feeling knotty: A man was seen dumping wooden boards onto the road in front of police vehicles during a high-speed chase in Ohio. His truck later caused a six-vehicle collision — but no life-threatening injuries were reported, according to the Montgomery County Sheriff's Office. • US senator forcibly removed from Noem news conference about LA protests• At least one survivor in Air India crash that killed 290 people• The FBI raided the wrong house. The Supreme Court says the family is allowed to sue 🩺 That's how many CDC employees the Department of Health and Human Services is reinstating after they were fired as part of a massive reorganization in April. 🖼️ Reviving a masterpiece: A treasured painting of Hercules and Omphale was damaged during the 2020 explosion in Beirut, and restoring it required more than three years of painstaking work. Now it's on display in Los Angeles. I always felt like I didn't have enough. Janet Blaser 💬 No regrets: The single mother of three was 'living paycheck to paycheck' in California when she decided to move to Mexico nearly 20 years ago. She says Mazatlán feels like home now. 🎵 Paul McCartney and others paid tribute to Brian Wilson, who died at age 82. Which popular group was Wilson part of?A. The DoorsB. The ByrdsC. Pink FloydD. The Beach Boys⬇️ Scroll down for the answer. 🥪 Hungry? When faced with a craving, there's hardly a country on the planet that doesn't turn to some type of bread with something stuffed inside it. To fuel your next transatlantic trip, here are 25 of the world's best sandwiches. 👋 We'll see you tomorrow.🧠 Quiz answer: D. Brian Wilson co-founded The Beach Boys and was the creative force behind the group's surf sound.📧 Check out all of CNN's newsletters. 5 Things PM was edited and produced by CNN's Chris Good, Meghan Pryce, Kimberly Richardson and Morgan Severson.
CNN
11-06-2025
- Science
- CNN
Accidental find in planetarium show could shift scientists' understanding of our solar system
CNN — An accidental discovery might change how we think about one of the most mysterious structures in our solar system. The Oort Cloud, a large expanse of icy bodies revolving around the sun at a distance 1,000 times greater than the orbit of Neptune, is widely thought to be spherical — although it has never been directly observed. But during the preproduction of a show titled 'Encounters in the Milky Way,' which debuted Monday at the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, a projection on the planetarium's dome revealed something strange within the Oort Cloud: a spiral. The curators were testing out a scene in September that includes a detailed view of Earth's celestial neighborhood — from the sun to the solar system's outer edges — and were surprised when they saw the structure, which looked coincidentally similar to a spiral galaxy such as our own. 'We hit play on the scene, and immediately we saw it. It was just there,' recalled Jackie Faherty, an astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History and the curator of the show. 'I was confused and thought that was super weird. I didn't know if it was an artifact, I didn't know if it was real.' To investigate, Faherty got in touch with David Nesvorny, an institute scientist with the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and the Oort Cloud expert who had provided scientific data for the scene. 'We didn't create it — David did,' Faherty said. 'This is David's simulation, and it's grounded in physics. It has a totally good physical explanation for why it should be there.' At first, Nesvorny suspected artifacts — abnormalities or distortions in the data visualization — but once he looked at his data, he confirmed the presence of the spiral and eventually published a scientific paper about the discovery in April in The Astrophysical Journal. 'Weird way to discover things,' he said. 'I should know my data better, after years of working with it.' Crazy, long orbits The existence of the Oort Cloud was first proposed in 1950 by Dutch astronomer Jan Oort, who imagined it as a shell of icy bodies swirling around the sun from up to 1.5 light-years away. The cloud is the most distant region in our solar system, stretching as much as halfway to the next star, according to NASA. It's composed of leftovers from the making of our solar system, which were scattered in every direction by the planets after they formed. That means many of the icy bodies in the Oort Cloud don't share the same orbital plane as the solar system itself but travel at various inclinations, which is why the Oort Cloud is pictured as a sphere. If one of those icy bodies gets flung inward toward the sun, the heat starts vaporizing some of the material in the body, creating a tail — and what we call a comet. 'Every now and again, some of these icy bodies come into the inner solar system, and we can see the orbit that they're on,' Faherty said. 'And they're on these really crazy, long orbits. It can take them millions of years to go around the sun. And when they come in, they help us understand how far away they may have come from.' The problem with trying to imagine what the Oort Cloud looks like is that scientists have never seen it, even though we are technically surrounded by it. That's because the bodies that make it up are small — fewer than 60 miles (97 kilometers) in diameter — and even though they potentially number in the trillions, they are far away, making observations with telescopes difficult. The spiral was hiding in Nesvorny's data because he had never thought of visualizing it three-dimensionally. 'I never looked at it in Cartesian coordinates — I didn't have a good reason to do so,' he said. 'But once you do that, it's obvious. It's there.' The galactic tide To confirm the findings, Nesvorny used one of the most powerful computers in the world, NASA's Pleiades Supercomputer, to run simulations that took weeks to complete. 'I thought, maybe just this particular simulation (I gave the planetarium) is showing it, and all the other simulations with other stellar encounters, other parameters, will not show it, in which case it wouldn't be so interesting,' he said. 'But all the simulations, all the models I have, show the spiral.' The reason it's there, he said, is that objects in the Oort Cloud are far away enough from the sun's gravity that they also start being affected by the galactic tide — the gravitational field of our galaxy, exerted by the stars and the dark matter in it. This field is acting on the small bodies and comets in the Oort Cloud by twisting their orbital planes to create a spiral. The spiral, Nesvorny added, is in the inner part of the Oort Cloud, the closest to us, and he still believes that the outer portion is spherical or shell-shaped. The problem of observing the Oort Cloud remains, even though the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, a powerful telescope that recently came online in Chile, could offer a hand by discovering and observing individual icy bodies in the cloud. However, according to Nesvorny, the telescope will likely discover dozens of these bodies — not the hundreds that would be required to produce a meaningful visualization of the spiral. The spiral theory helps to illuminate the dynamics of our solar system, according to Faherty. 'If you're going to come up with a theory of how solar systems evolve, you should take into account the kind of shapes you might have in their structure,' she said. 'Maybe comets helped deliver water to Earth. Maybe the building blocks of life could be out there in the Oort Cloud, so if you want to talk about the potential building blocks of life that surround our solar system, you need to understand its shape.' It's a 'dream,' she added, to be able to present science so recent in a show aimed at the general public. 'I truly believe that the planetarium, the dome itself, is a research tool,' Faherty said. 'I like to say that this is science that hasn't had time to reach your textbook yet.' Viewing what's not visible The spiral finding is a wonderful example of just how much we can learn through visualizing the universe in new ways, said Malena Rice, an assistant professor of astronomy at Yale University who did not participate in the study. 'This result reshapes our mental image of our home solar system, while also providing a new sense for what extrasolar systems' Oort clouds may look like,' Rice added. 'It unites our models of the solar system with what we know about the broader galaxy, placing it into context as a dynamic system. We are not static, and we are not isolated — our solar system is shaped by its broader ecosystem, and the Oort spiral exemplifies that.' While the paper is interesting, it is almost entirely theoretical, as it is based on numerical simulations of the interactions between the sun's gravity and the gravitational pull of the rest of the Milky Way galaxy's motion, said Edward Gomez, an astrophysicist and honorary lecturer at Cardiff University in the UK. He also was not involved with the study. 'Long period comets enter the inner solar system at a range of angles, which the authors try to model using their spiral arm idea,' Gomez said in an email. 'What they are proposing could be true, but it could also be modelled by other shapes of the Oort cloud or physical processes. How to test this is their major issue, because only a handful of potential Oort cloud objects are known about.' Confirming the findings will be a challenge, noted Simon Portegies Zwart, a professor of numerical star dynamics at Leiden University in the Netherlands who was not part of the team behind the research. 'It is interesting that they found the spiral, (but) it seems unlikely that we are going to witness (it) in the foreseeable future,' he said. With luck, he added, the Vera Rubin observatory will detect a few hundred inner Oort Cloud objects, but the spiral would only be visible if many more are found: 'It therefore seems unlikely to be a clearly detectable structure.'
