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First Oort Cloud Object May Have Been Discovered

Posted by kdawson on from the lands-where-the-jumblies-live dept.

SpuriousLogic alerts us to the discovery of what may be the first object ever discovered from the inner edge of the Oort cloud. 2006 SQ372 was found on images from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. Its discoverers theorize that this comet-like object and the planetoid Sedna, first spotted in 2003, might be Oort denizens. Sedna is in a stable orbit but 2006 SQ372 has been perturbed by the gravity of Uranus and/or Neptune, simulations suggest, so its orbital history is unknowable. 2006 SQ372 will travel out to 1,600 AU on this orbit, making it the most distant solar-system object yet found. The Oort cloud is believed to extend ten times that far, or about a quarter of a light-year. "Theoretical models of the formation of the Oort Cloud predict that it should also host a massive inner part, but comets from this region never make it near Earth. To see the long-period comets from the inner region of the Oort Cloud requires observing comets whose orbits always stay well outside Saturn's orbit — like 2006 SQ372."

5 of 110 comments (clear)

  1. Confusing title by hedleyroos · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    I thought the article was about some new object oriented relational type (OORT) which now exists in Amazon's S3 cloud.

  2. perturbing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    I find the gravity of uranus pretty perturbing myself.

    1. Re:perturbing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

      Well I guess you haven't checked out Urectum lately.

    2. Re:perturbing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

      AC is right, you should really have that colon checked out every couple of years. It wouldn't hurt to have a doctor examine your prostate too, if you're man enough to own a prostate and be able to handle a doctor with some man hands, a flyswatter, and some Ben Gay, but that's mainly just for cheap thrills and insurance fraud.

  3. Cloud benchmarks? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    so how does the oort cloud's performance stack up against amazon ec3?