Far beyond the planets, the Solar System is thought to be wrapped in an immense spherical shell of icy bodies - the Oort Cloud. It marks the true edge of the Sun’s domain, its outer reaches extending perhaps halfway to the nearest star, and it is where the great long-period comets like Hale-Bopp come from.
Open the 3D Solar SystemEverything from the planets to the Kuiper Belt orbits in a flattened disc, yet long-period comets like Hale-Bopp arrive from every direction in the sky. That is the giveaway: their source must be a spherical cloud - icy bodies scattered outward by the giant planets long ago, then puffed into a shell by the tugs of passing stars and the tide of the galaxy itself.
| Diameter | 0 km |
| Dimensions | ~2,000 – 100,000 AU (hypothesised) km |
| Composition | Believed to be billions of icy bodies - dirty snowballs of frozen water, methane and ammonia. |
The Oort cloud has never been observed directly; its existence is inferred from long-period comet orbits. The in-app rendering is a conceptual model visualization, not observational data.