In a groundbreaking discovery, NASA's Pleiades supercomputer has revealed an unexpected spiral structure within the inner ...

Early in our Solar System’s history, bits of icy debris were scattered and then gradually coaxed into a spiral alignment in ...

Most of the long-period comets in the Solar System come from the outer Oort Cloud. The inner region is much more stable. It's ...

The identity of this presumed cloud is not fully known, but scientists strongly believe that it is a source of long-period comets (LPCs) that enter the inner solar system from time to time and can ...

The Oort cloud is traditionally thought of as a vast shell of perhaps trillions of icy objects encasing our solar system, the final boundary between us and the reaches of interstellar space. But it's ...

Beautifully captured against a starry sky, Comet C/2024 G3 (ATLAS) — dubbed by some as the "Great Comet of 2025" — shines brightly after its last approach to the sun for hundreds of thousands of years ...

Occasionally, some wayward gravitational perturbation will knock one of them a weird way and create a long-period comet, which might briefly delight us lowly humans by providing something ...

This distant zone, known as the Oort Cloud, remains unseen, but its existence is inferred from the long-period comets that occasionally journey inward. Now, a new model suggests that the inner ...

Most of our evidence for it comes from long-period comets — "snowballs" of ice and dust punted from the cloud to orbit around the sun by gravitational perturbations. To better understand what ...

If you ever spend a night under the stars watching for meteors and saw something unusual, you may want to meet astronomer Dr. Peter Jenniskens. He’s an expert on meteor showers and author of Meteor ...

This theory also provides an explanation for the unorthodox orbits of long-period comets from the Oort Cloud. They usually move in new patterns, perhaps indicating the presence of force or ...