Scientists detected a strange space signal: what they found blew their minds

The NASA boffins in white coats and thick-rimmed glasses have detected new signals that show the Oort cloud - the spooky shell of icy objects at the very edge of our solar system - might have spiralling arms that resemble a galaxy.

At present, despite all we know about deep space and the complexities of the universe, the Oort cloud remains almost entirely mysterious. While its composition seems to be be understood, questions remain about everything from its shape to how forces act upon it.

Proposed in 1950 by the Dutch astronomer Jan Oort, the cloud sits between 2,000 and 200,000 AU (Astronomical units) For reference, 1 AU is the average distance from the Earth to the Sun: 93 million miles or 150 million kilometres.

Oort cloud study gives strange results

It’s largely believed that Oort cloud came into being as the unused remnants of the creation of Jupiter, Neptune, Uranus and Saturn, around 4.6 billion years ago.

While studies are always ongoing, recent developments propose a model that says the inner structure of the Oort cloud may look like a spiral disk. The findings were published on February 16 on the preprint server arXiv, meaning the work it yet to be peer-reviewed - a crucial step in any scientific experiment.

In their experiment, researchers tried to look at the gravitational effects of objects on either side of the Oort cloud in order to build up a model of what the cloud itself could look like. However, when they ran the numbers through the NASA’s Pleiades supercomputer, it came back with a mysterious structure for the inner part of the cloud that looked incredibly similar to the spiral disk of the Milky Way.

Why it’s so difficult to study the Oort cloud

In order to confirm this structure, observations are needed, as researchers will have to track the objects directly themselves or locate the light reflected from them - both incredibly difficult tasks with little resources.

The Oort cloud remains a mystery for a number of reasons. The bodies that make up the region are relatively tiny, meaning even our strongest telescopes have trouble picking them up in any great detail.

Being so far away from the Sun makes them incredibly faint; they are (we think) merely rocks and planet-sized chunks of ice, nothing in them gives off light which would make them more photo-friendly.

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LiveScience explains that most of our evidence of what we know of the Oort cloud “comes from long-period comets — “snowballs” of ice and dust punted from the cloud to orbit around the sun by gravitational perturbations."

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