A Spiral Structure in the Inner Oort Cloud
Earth and Planetary Astrophysics
2025-02-18 v1 Astrophysics of Galaxies
Abstract
As the Galactic tide acts to decouple bodies from the scattered disk it creates a spiral structure in physical space that is roughly 15,000 au in length. The spiral is long-lived and persists in the inner Oort cloud to the present time. Here we discuss dynamics underlying the Oort spiral and (feeble) prospects for its observational detection.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2502.11252,
title = {A Spiral Structure in the Inner Oort Cloud},
author = {David Nesvorny and Luke Dones and David Vokrouhlicky and Hal F. Levison and Cristian Beauge and Jacqueline Faherty and Carter Emmart and Jon P. Parker},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.11252},
year = {2025}
}
Comments
ApJ, in press