The Solar System is much bigger than we learned in school, with a more complicated history.

This famous photograph shows a portion of the Eagle Nebula, about 7,000 lightyears away from us but still within the Milky Way Galaxy.  The nebula is a diffuse mass of dust, gas  (mostly hydrogen atoms, of course) and hundreds of stars aborning.  Spectroscopic red- and blue-shift data could prove me wrong, but to my eye those “pillars” are exactly what you’d expect to see if each had formed around a vortex such as I described in my previous post.  Those two bright rings look very much like solar nebulae, don’t they?

If that’s what the rings are, then the region between them should be even emptier than normal interstellar space (estimated at one hydrogen atom per cm³ or about 30 atoms per fluid ounce if you swing that way).  If you’re floating in vacuum and a whole solar system’s gravity is pulling you towards it, then that’s where you’ll go.  Interstellar space will be emptier without you.

By the way, space between galaxies is a million times emptier than space between stars.

The solar nebula hypothesis does a decent job of explaining the familiar structure — an inward succession of gas giants, then an asteroid belt, then rocky planets, all orbiting within a degree or so of their common Plane of The Ecliptic.  When the Sun lit up 4.6 billion years ago, its fierce light stripped hydrogen and other light elements from the region where the inner planets were coalescing.  Those atoms fled outward to the asteroids, the gas giants and beyond.  An eon later, the rocky planets collected water and other volatiles from impacting comets and such.

But some incoming objects, especially the long-period comets, seem to have no respect for the Ecliptic.  They come at us from all angles, an oddity that led Ernst Öpik and Jan Oort to suggest that the familiar planar Solar System is in fact enclosed by a spherical shell of loosely-held objects, ready to pelt us at any time from wherever they happened to be.

No-one’s yet seen that shell, but statistical models suggest it’s huge.  Earth is one Astronomical Unit (AU) from the Sun.  Neptune, our farthest-out known planet, orbits at about 30 AU.  Researchers think the Oort Cloud starts somewhere near 2,000 AU and runs out to 20,000 or more.  Some suggest it may contain material from other solar systems.

Astronomers also think the Cloud contains something like a trillion objects, pebble-size up to planetoids or bigger.  In a volume that large, the average distance between objects is about 30 AU.  When NASA’s New Horizon spacecraft finally flies through the Oort Cloud 900 years from now, accidentally colliding with something shouldn’t be a problem.

In between the familiar Solar System and the Oort Cloud there’s a whole zoo of objects we’ve only started to glimpse in the past 25 years.  The Kuiper Belt is a doughnut of about 100,000 bodies that stay close to the Ecliptic Plane but orbit from just beyond Neptune’s orbit out to about twice as far.  (By my calculation the average distance between the rocks is, you guessed it, about 30 AU.)  These guys are heavily influenced by Neptune’s gravity and thought to be leftovers from our solar nebula.  Most short-period comets seem to come from the Kuiper Belt.

Recently, CalTech astrophysicists Konstantin Batygin and Michael Brown, drew attention to a half-dozen objects with orbits that were strangely similar.  Unlike the other thousand-or-so Kuiper Belt Objects characterized so far, these all

• go further than 250 AU from the Sun despite getting as close as 50 AU
• have a perihelion (the point of closest approach to the Sun) at about the same equatorial latitude (see the diagram)
• (the kicker) the perihelion drops below the ecliptic by about the same amount.

The authors account for these observations, and more, by hypothesizing a Planet 9 that roams out beyond the Kuiper Belt.  They call it “a mildly inclined, highly eccentric distant perturber.”  I know what you’re thinking, but in the paper those are technical terms.

~~ Rich Olcott