Discovery about outer solar system during set-up up of planetarium show shocks astronomers
At the American Museum of Natural History last autumn, experts were hard at work preparing 'Encounters in the Milky Way', a deep dive into our home galaxy shaped by the movements of stars and other celestial objects.
They were fine-tuning a scene featuring what's known as the Oort Cloud, a theoretical region far beyond Pluto believed to be filled with icy relics from the solar system's formation that pass into the solar system as comets.
One evening while watching the Oort Cloud scene, scientists noticed something strange projected onto the planetarium's dome.
A new planetarium show created a backwards S-shaped spiral in a mock-up of the Oort Cloud, causing excitement among some scientists. Photo: AP
'Why is there a spiral there?' said the museum's Jackie Faherty.
The inner section of the Oort Cloud, made of billions of comets, resembled a bar with two waving arms, similar to the shape of our Milky Way galaxy.
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