"We were quite surprised," Dones continued. "Spirals are seen in Saturn's rings, disks around young stars and galaxies. The ...

Puffy to wispy, barely there or dark and menacing, clouds come in many shapes and sizes. Each tells a story about what’s ...

Most of the long-period comets in the Solar System come from the outer Oort Cloud. The inner region is much more stable. It's ...

The Oort cloud is a shell of icy objects that forms the very outskirts of our Solar System. Recently, a group of researchers discovered that the inner portion of the Oort cloud likely has spiral arms ...

But perhaps the oddest of all is the Oort Cloud, a vast field of icy debris extending out to 100,000 times the distance between Earth and the Sun. We have a rough idea of the size and shape of this ...

The researchers involved with the new study were interested in the inner Oort cloud for another reason: its shape. Pairing an analytic model with the supercomputer simulation, they concluded that the ...

If the molecular cloud retains its filamentary shape, it is more likely to break up along its long "string" and form many stars like our sun, a low-mass star with planetary systems. On the other ...

But what the Oort cloud actually looks like and how it is affected by forces greater than just our solar system has remained somewhat of a mystery. A new paper posted to the arXiv preprint server ...

23 (UPI) --A shell of icy objects at the edge of the solar system known as the Oort cloud has a pair of spiral arms that resemble a miniature galaxy, new research suggests. Until now, the shape of ...