Stolen from a stellar nursery (Image: Royal Observatory, Edinburgh/AAO/SPL)
OUR sun may have stolen the vast majority of its comets from other stars. The theft could explain the puzzling profusion of objects in a huge reservoir surrounding the sun called the Oort cloud.
The Oort cloud is a collection of comets thought to orbit the sun in a roughly spherical halo about 50,000 times as far from the sun as Earth – at the outer edge of the solar system. How did the comets get there? In the standard picture, they formed much closer to the sun, then migrated outward…
