“The great oak of Astronomy has been felled, and we are lost without its shadow.” –Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, on the passing of Jan Oort
In our Solar System, we have the inner, rocky worlds, an asteroid belt, the gas giants and then the Kuiper belt. Out beyond that, in theory, we have the Oort cloud, where a few of the longest-period comets come from.
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons user fir0002, from http://ift.tt/1xcTUQE.
Due to its tremendous distance — the Kuiper belt ends at just 50 A.U. — we weren’t able to find Oort cloud objects in situ for all of the 20th century. But that changed with the discovery of Sedna, and now we’ve got a handful of others, indicating to us at last that the Oort cloud is real!
Image credit: Scott S. Sheppard / Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory.
Come find out which object is the farthest now, and what will be the farthest in the future, for today’s Throwback Thursday!
from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/1W6pB6t
“The great oak of Astronomy has been felled, and we are lost without its shadow.” –Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, on the passing of Jan Oort
In our Solar System, we have the inner, rocky worlds, an asteroid belt, the gas giants and then the Kuiper belt. Out beyond that, in theory, we have the Oort cloud, where a few of the longest-period comets come from.
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons user fir0002, from http://ift.tt/1xcTUQE.
Due to its tremendous distance — the Kuiper belt ends at just 50 A.U. — we weren’t able to find Oort cloud objects in situ for all of the 20th century. But that changed with the discovery of Sedna, and now we’ve got a handful of others, indicating to us at last that the Oort cloud is real!
Image credit: Scott S. Sheppard / Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory.
Come find out which object is the farthest now, and what will be the farthest in the future, for today’s Throwback Thursday!
from ScienceBlogs http://ift.tt/1W6pB6t
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