A Spiral Structure in the Inner Oort Cloud

As the Galactic tide acts to decouple bodies from the scattered disk it creates a spiral structure in physical space that is roughly 15,000 au in length. The spiral is long-lived and persists in the inner Oort cloud to the present time. Here we discuss dynamics underlying the Oort spiral and (feeble) prospects for its observational detection. Original content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence . Any further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the title of the work, journal citation and DOI. 1. Introduction The Oort cloud is a large shell of icy bodies surrounding the solar system at heliocentric distances 1000 ≲ r ≲ 100,000 au. These bodies are faint and not directly observed, but their existence is inferred from observations of long-period comets (LPCs; J. H. Oort 1950). The so-called new LPCs, which are observed during their first perihelion passage through the inner solar system, often ha ... Read full article.