#Science - Socratic Sunday - Does the Oort cloud exist? If so, why can't we see it?

Hey there,

I'm here again with another Socratic Sunday (I think the name keeps changing slightly. Maybe one of these days I'll actually find one that'll stick...), this time with a question concerning the much theorized Oort cloud:

Question

Does the Oort cloud exist? If so, why can't we see it?

Answer

The Oort Cloud is theorized to exist but due to many factors we can't see it.

Analysis

First let's talk about what the Oort Cloud is (and what it isn't).

The first thing to know is that it is theorized that the cloud exists. While definitive proof will be difficult to come by, the theory helps explain many questions in astronomy (where do long-period comets come from and how to describe their orbits, etc)

From http://space-facts.com/oort-cloud/, it's a region of space that surrounds the solar system where ice, rock, and the occasional larger body (sometimes called Dwarf Planets) exist. The region is a spherical shell and starts about 2,000 AU (Astronomical Units) from the Sun (and to put that into perspective, 1 AU is the average distance from Earth to the Sun. Pluto is 40 AU from the Sun.) and extends well out towards the closest star (perhaps as much as 100,000AU away from the Sun or roughly 1/4 of the distance between the Sun and the closest star).

What it isn't is a cloud in the sense we think about clouds on Earth - big puffy things made up of water vapour that are easy to spot in the sky. Clouds in the astronomical sense are far less dense but are much more vast so that we see them when the light of stars and galaxies is interfered with.

So what would make the cloud hard to see?

Things that we observe in space are observable only if we can see them.

So what does it take to be able to see something? Light.

And where does the light come from? It either is produced by the object (ex. the Sun, a lamp, etc) or the light is reflected off the object (ex. the Moon).

When light is reflected, all the light that strikes the object doesn't bounce back - it gets scattered, absorbed, and the like, so only a tiny fraction of what strikes the object is reflected back (which is why the Moon, even though it can be quite bright at night, isn't anywhere near as bright as the Sun. The Moon absorbs some light and what is reflected is scattered off in all sorts of directions - only a fraction reaches Earth).

Clouds in the Earth's sky are visible because there is a strong light source (the Sun) that allows the clouds to scatter the light and yet still have plenty left for us to look up and see them. There is no light source like that for the Oort Cloud, so what light it gets, when scattered, doesn't come back towards Earth but instead flies off in random directions.

How much light does the Oort Cloud receive? Light diminishes exponentially with distance. A strong light source at distance 1 will only be $\frac{1}{4}$ as strong at distance 2, $\frac{1}{9}$ at distance 3, etc. And this is for both the journey of the light to the object and the reflection back! What that means is that for an object at the closest edge of the Cloud, it receives ${\left(\frac{1}{2000}\right)}^2=\frac{1}{4,000,000}$ the amount of light we get (remember that Earth is at distance 1 AU and the edge of the Cloud is at distance 2000AU)! And then light that is reflected back towards Earth and so we see $\frac{1}{4,000,000}$ of that!

The Oort Cloud does not make its own light, so we need reflected light to see it. The Cloud is made up of small rocks and pieces of ice with huge distances between them, so most of the light that does manage to make it there passes right through and never reflects. Space rocks and ice are notoriously "dirty" - or covered in a dark coloured "space dust", so most of the light is absorbed by the rocks in the Cloud. And the distances involved are massive, so much so that to see Pluto and a few of the other large objects in the Cloud, it takes very powerful telescopes and a lot of luck in finding them.

The only other way of seeing the Cloud is with the use of a deep space probe. However, because of the vast distances, it's difficult to build a spacecraft that can make the journey. According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oort_cloud, Voyager 1, the farthest and fastest moving probe we have and launched in 1977, will be another 300 years before it reaches the Cloud and by then will have no power to explore or send back data. Other probes also making their way out of the solar system will also run out of power long before making contact with the Oort Cloud.

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As always, questions and comments are always welcome!