A bizarre interstellar cosmic body was filmed over the Canadian city of Edmonton on February 22, 2021. One of the divisions of the Global Fireball Observatory operates there – a global network of cameras scan the sky around the clock and record everything that falls to Earth. Or does not fall, because it does not have time to fall.
It did not just reach the surface of our planet, but completely burned out in the atmosphere. As soon as scientists began to study this event, riddles began.
They said that the trajectory of the object’s movement indicates that it came from the farthest outskirts of the solar system, the Oort Cloud. It is so called because one of the first to suspect its existence was the Dutch astronomer Jan Oort. He considered the inexplicable abundance of comets coming from deep space and put forward the idea that it seems that the solar system is surrounded by a giant sphere of such objects and sometimes, under the influence of someone’s gravity, they visit us.
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One of the most striking and famous examples is Comet Hale-Bopp, the same one that adorned the sky in 1997. It is believed that it is the Oort Cloud that is the source of all long-period comets, those that make one revolution around the Sun in at least 200 years. It must be said that today, more than 7.5 thousand comets and a good 6 thousand of them are long-period, which means, most likely, from the same Oort Cloud.
Unfortunately, there is no way to see the hypothetical cloud through a telescope, this is such a rarefied sphere, as the ice floes are located at such distances from each other that it would probably be difficult to even intentionally collide with them. You can see this sphere only if you fly far beyond its limits, and it is located at a distance of a whole light year, already in interstellar space. The famous Voyager 1 will take about three hundred years to fly there.
So, since the Oort Cloud became known thanks to numerous comets, it was concluded that it consists of such space ice floes. According to rough ideas, there should be trillions of comets with a diameter of more than a kilometer. Consequently, there are countless smaller ones and in principle, all this is quite consistent with ideas about how the solar system was born and developed.
Astrophysicists believe that the Oort Cloud is the remnants of the protoplanetary cloud in which all our planets formed. They were originally much closer to the Sun, but then, under the influence of Jupiter, Saturn and other large planets, their orbits were very much extended, they flew away and gradually settled where they are now. It seems that it is much easier to throw ice floes into the back of the system in this way – they are less dense and lighter, than rocks. Everything that is denser and heavier remains closer.
This slender scenario is now collapsing. The mysterious object that burned up over Canada is not a comet. The comet, as the scientists assured, would have burnt clean much earlier and would not have gone so deeply into our atmosphere. The way it fell apart speaks of an asteroid, that is, a rocky body which is something almost unheard of.
Until now, scientists did not know that there were asteroids in the Oort Cloud. However, there were data in the archives on a similar event in 1979. Based on this, astronomers calculated how many rocks can be in that sphere surrounding us, and it turned out that they are about 6%.
It’s not clear where they come from. There is even a theory that they are generally “not local” – captured from another star system. Moreover, it has been suggested that this is the former property of a star that was the sister of the Sun and once paired with it in a binary star system.
