What a Spiral in the Oort Cloud Could Mean for Life on Earth
A routine planetarium show at New York's Hayden Planetarium just triggered a potentially historic discovery in astrophysics.
While curating scenes for 'Encounters in the Milky Way,' a team of scientists and animators stumbled across something surprising: a spiral structure hidden within the data modeling the Oort Cloud, which is one of the most mysterious regions in our solar system.
The Oort Cloud, theorized to be a spherical shell of icy objects orbiting far beyond Neptune, has long remained unseen. Yet when astrophysicist Jackie Faherty noticed the unexpected shape during a simulation, she called in Oort Cloud expert David Nesvorny to investigate, according to a CNN report.
It wasn't an animation glitch. It was real data.
Nesvorny, who had generated the simulation, admitted he'd never viewed his data in three-dimensional Cartesian coordinates. When he did, the spiral structure emerged clearly. 'Weird way to discover things,' he said. 'I should know my data better.'
This accidental find prompted Nesvorny to run weeks of simulations on NASA's Pleiades Supercomputer. Every model confirmed it: a spiral, caused not by the sun's gravity alone, but by the galactic tide—the pull of the Milky Way's own gravitational field acting on the outermost parts of our solar system. Ultimately, he published the findings in The Astrophysics Journal.
The discovery reshapes long-held assumptions. While the outer Oort Cloud might still be spherical, the inner part appears to twist in a spiral pattern, suggesting our solar system is more dynamically connected to the galaxy than once thought.
Still, verifying the spiral won't be easy. The icy bodies in the Oort Cloud are too small and distant to observe directly. Even with the powerful new Vera C. Rubin Observatory, scientists expect to find only a handful—far short of the numbers needed to fully confirm the structure.
But as Faherty put it, the dome of a planetarium can now double as a tool of discovery. 'This is science that hasn't had time to reach your textbook yet,' she said.
What a Spiral in the Oort Cloud Could Mean for Life on Earth first appeared on Men's Journal on Jun 11, 2025
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