The paper attributes the solar system's spiral structure to the galactic tide. If I'm not mistaken, and this might be outdated, the galactic spiral structure is attributed to massive clumping - massive particles attract.
("Massive" meaning particles with mass - not necessarily large. "Particles" meaning macroscopic particles, not subatomic.)
(Somewhat) similar mechanisms are at work whether you're pulling together stars into a galaxy, hydrogen gas into a solar system or water towards the drain of your bath tub - a pull towards the center, the centripetal force, slight variations producing "artifacts".
The spirals shown in the paper do look like idealised spirals of very young galaxies, shortly after the bar phase. I wonder, other than spirals, what other artifacts such processes might cause.
Imagine an accretian disk undergoing fusion in spiral-shaped filaments!
In what way?
The spiral structure here is a hypothesis within a hypothesis. Whatever objects comprise the Oort Cloud, they haven't been directly observed. Scientists have inferred its existence from a variety of comets that seem related and have very, very long orbital periods, such as 200 years, or 2,000 years. So these comets are observed once-in-a-lifetime, or once-in-a-civilization, and the hypotheses say that they're being dislodged somehow from a "cloud of planetesimals" where a bunch more of them are found.
But this supposed cloud would be extremely sparse: plenty of space in-between the very small icy bodies, and individually, they're so much smaller, and so distant from the Sun, that they don't reflect enough light to our telescopes. They really don't send signals in other wavelengths, either, like a pulsar or quasar or something with an active powerplant.
This is beyond the Kuiper Belt, even; the Kuiper Belt, if it indeed be a belt, has offered us a couple of directly-observed objects, including Pluto and Charon.
So it's nice to conjecture and invent proposals for some kind of structure there, but the very existence and extent of the Oort Cloud is something that's been extrapolated and inferred from secondary evidence.
In this case of the Oort cloud the galactic tides would be what are responsible for inducing the change in orientation of the elliptical orbits as a function of semi-major axis.
That's a pretty cool way to discover something like this. Here is the simulation animation:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TuacHdAeZ5J8wNAJvlYv435x9Oj...
"This was in the fall of 1951, and I was walking between the observatory and home, which is only 100 yards away. I was looking up in the sky ... just looking up in the region of the Double Cluster [in Perseus], and I realized I had been getting distance moduli corrected the best way I could with the colors that were available, for numbers of stars in the general region ... Anyway, I was walking. I was looking up at the sky, and it suddenly occurred to me that the double cluster in Perseus, and then a number of stars in Cassiopeia, these are not the bright stars but the distant stars, and even Cepheus, that along there I was getting distance moduli, of between 11 and 12, corrected distance moduli. Well, 11.5 is two kiloparsecs ... and so, I couldn’t wait to get over here and really plot them up. It looked like they were at the same distance ... It looked like a concentration ... And so, as soon as I began plotting this out, the first thing that showed up was that there was a concentration, a long narrow concentration of young stars ... There are HII regions along there too ... And that was the thing that broke [the problem] down."
Full article here: https://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-iarticle_que...
But, yeah, the spiral thing is cool too.
As I understand it, these shows are sort of syndicated and shared among many locations. Some of them were several years old.
This completely change how we should think about the 'edge' of our solar system!
girvo•1d ago
SCUSKU•1d ago
tonyhart7•1d ago
recursive•1d ago
samyok•1d ago
here's the pdf, though: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-4357/adbf9b/...
w10-1•1d ago
dcassett•1d ago
graemep•1d ago
But someone's metrics are showing 20+ bot request blocked!
misja111•1d ago
gs17•16h ago
I asked Gemini to solve this "puzzle" and it could do it. Whatever weird filter they're trying to apply to the images doesn't work well enough.