Just under three hours after passing Neptune’s orbit, the Sun’s light passes beyond the outer edge of the Kuiper Belt.Īfter another 12 hours the sunlight reaches the heliopause, where the solar wind - a torrent of charged particles flowing away from the Sun at about a million miles per hour (400 kilometers per second) - smooshes up against the interstellar medium. When light leaves the Sun, it takes a little over eight minutes to reach Earth, and about 4.5 hours to reach Neptune’s orbit. And it won’t exit the outer edge for maybe 30,000 years.Įven if you could travel at the speed of light (about 671 million miles per hour, or 1 billion kilometers per hour), a trip to the Oort Cloud would require that you pack for a lengthy expedition.Ī short video guide to distance in the cosmos. At its current speed of about a million miles a day, NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft won't enter the Oort Cloud for about 300 years. If those distances are difficult to visualize, you can instead use time as your ruler. The inner edge of the Oort Cloud, however, is thought to be located between 2,000 and 5,000 AU from the Sun, with the outer edge being located somewhere between 10,000 and 100,000 AU from the Sun. To appreciate the distance to the Oort Cloud, it’s helpful to set aside miles and kilometers and instead use the astronomical unit, or AU - a unit defined as the distance between Earth and the Sun, with 1 AU being roughly 93 million miles or 150 million kilometers.įor comparison, Pluto’s more elliptical orbit carries it between about 30 and 50 astronomical units from the Sun. The Oort Cloud is the most distant region in our solar system, and it's jaw-droppingly far away,extending perhaps one-quarter to halfway from our Sun to the next star. In the silence and darkness between the stars, where our Sun appears as just a particularly bright star, a theorized group of icy objects collectively called the Oort Cloud coast along their orbits like lazy moths around a porch light. The Oort Cloud's icy bodies can be as large as mountains - and sometimes larger. It's like a big, thick bubble around our solar system, made of icy, comet-like objects. While the planets of our solar system orbit in a flat plane, the Oort Cloud is believed to be a giant spherical shell surrounding the Sun, planets and Kuiper Belt Objects. Even on Earth, probably the only people who would notice this would be NASA astronomers and other scientists studying it since Neptune is the only planet not visible to the naked eye.The Oort Cloud lies far beyond Pluto and the most distant edges of the Kuiper Belt. Pluto would probably face an altered orbit and Uranus might shift its orbit a little closer towards Saturn but the rest of the planets are way far away to even notice the disappearance. Now, if Neptune were to suddenly disappear from our solar system, not much would have changed. A passing star can seal the fate of Neptune And it is not because its gravitational pull influences the other planets, but because it is the most vulnerable planet in this system. But the planet that can affect the solar system the most is the farthest planet, Neptune. For example Jupiter, the largest planet protects the inner ring from asteroids and meteors and Mercury rotates at such a high speed that consistently defies the gravitational pull of the Sun to keep it in its orbit. However, this gravitationally stable system has been able to stay this way because different planets play significant roles in keeping it that way. Our solar system is a perfectly balanced cosmic entity that supports our Sun eight planets and a dwarf planet, Pluto.
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