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Showing posts from June, 2007

The Halo. . .

Scientists believe that, beyond the planets, our solar system is surrounded by a huge cloud of of invisible objects. This is called the Oort cloud . It it were back lit somehow, seen from the nearest star this cloud would look like a halo. This halo is huge. It is estimated to extend 18,000,000,000,000 miles from the sun. That is a big number, 200,000 times the distance from the earth to the sun. At this distance our sun would be a mere pip of light, really indistinguishable from the other stars in the inky sky. It is dark here. It is cold, estimated to be only 4 degrees above absolute zero at noon. The population of comet-like objects residing here is huge. These countless billions or trillions of objects, these denizens of the dark spend changeless ages doing what they have always done, from the day of their creation, until something happens. A passing star, the merest gravitational nudge of a distant hydrogen cloud softly tweaks, softly perturbs their utterly predictable, unyieldin