This illustration shows the location of our solar system. As you can see, it is surrounded by a sphere made up of millions of objects composed of rock and ice, known as the Oort Cloud. This shell of celestial bodies is located at a distance ranging between 20,000 and 100,000 astronomical units (1 AU = average Earth-Sun distance, 150 million kilometers). We could perhaps better understand its scale by saying it extends from 0.3 to 1.5 light-years from Earth.

The Oort Cloud has never been directly observed, as it is too distant and too dark even for modern telescopes, but it is believed to be the nursery from which all long-period comets originate, such as Hale-Bopp, for example. This cloud is thought to be a remnant of the nebula from which the Sun and planets were born five billion years ago. It is believed that other stars also have an Oort Cloud and that the outer edges of the clouds of two nearby stars may sometimes overlap.

In 1932, astronomer Ernst Öpik hypothesized that comets originated in a cloud located at the outer edge of the Solar System. This idea was later revisited and refined by Dutch astronomer Jan Oort to explain what appeared to be a contradiction. If comets are periodically destroyed after several passes through the inner solar system and had formed in the beginning, they would all be gone by now. The fact that they can still be observed implies they have a different origin. By observing and studying the orbits of long-period comets, the astronomer theorized the existence of this cloud, which was aptly named after him. Occasionally, one of these comets is perturbed in its orbit and begins to fall toward the Sun.

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