The Oort Cloud, an expanse of icy bodies in the far reaches of our solar system, is shown here in a scene from "Encounters in the Milky Way," a show at New York City's Hayden Planetarium that spawned ...

The human mind may find it difficult to conceptualize: a cosmic cloud so colossal it surrounds the Sun and eight planets as it extends trillions of miles into deep space. The spherical shell known as ...

The human mind may find it difficult to conceptualize a cosmic cloud so colossal it surrounds the Sun and eight planets as it extends trillions of miles into deep space. The spherical shell known as ...

The Oort cloud is a region in our solar system's vicinity we don’t know all that much about. Named after Dutch astronomer Jan Oort, it is a theoretical concept comprising planetesimals (solid objects ...

Rocky fireballs like the one that fell over Alberta, Canada last year shouldn't originate from the icy Oort Cloud... but this one apparently did. When you purchase through links on our site, we may ...

Interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS is tearing through our solar system at roughly 130,000 miles per hour, a speed that turns ...

Comet 3I/ATLAS has gone from obscure catalog entry to one of the most closely watched objects in the sky, and the latest ...

Like the newly-identified 2014 UN271, the NEOWISE comet pictured here is a long-period comet originating in the Oort Cloud. Photo by NASA Johnson via Flickr under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 Amateur astronomers, ...

Earth could be peppered with deadly wayward comets in just over a million years' time when a wandering star enters the outer reaches of the Solar System. Popular culture is full of cosmic doomsday ...

Ernest Opik, an Estonian astronomer based at the Astronomical Observatory in Tartu from 1921-1944, commenced research on the frequencies and speeds of meteors and comets in the 1920s. In 1932, Opik ...