What is the Oort cloud? Where is it located and what kinds of objects come from it?
The Oort cloud is a region of the solar system taken to be beyond Neptune’s orbit and extending out to the aphelion of the long period comets’ orbits. This is anywhere from 40,000 to 100,000 AU from the sun. Since long period comets come from all directions uniformly, we assume that the Oort cloud is roughly spherical around the Sun. As we’ve implied, the Oort cloud is home to swarms of comets and other material left over from the formation of the solar system. 8. What is the solar nebula? What is its shape and why? The solar system formed from a large cloud of material in which gravitational collapse was started by some outside triggering event. As the cloud collapsed a region became more dense than other regions and its gravity became the focus of the cloud’s collapse. As material approached this focus it began to rotate around the focus just as hurricanes and water going down a drain rotate. The physics of this rotation is called conservation of angular momentum. As more and more ma
