While a team of researchers and amateur astronomers were following meteors on a winter night in Lake Mequilin Park in the province of Alberta in southern Canada, a huge meteor passed in the sky that illuminated the entire region for a moment and then disappeared completely, and after a subsequent study it turned out that it was coming from a place tens of billions of kilometers away from us. This may change scientists' view of the origins of the solar system.
The meteors that shine in this way are called fireballs, and this team was looking specifically for fireballs in order to study their composition, and usually the fireballs are rocky like this burning meteor.
According to the study published by this research team in the journal Nature Astronomy on December 12, a closer examination conducted by the observatories of the International Meteor Organization showed that the weight of this rock that burned causing the fireball was two kilograms. Studying its trajectory in the sky indicates that it is coming from the Oort cloud.
The Oort Cloud is a huge spherical cloud that surrounds the entire solar system behind the so-called Kuiper Belt (NASA)
Farthest place in the solar system
The Oort cloud is a huge spherical cloud that surrounds the entire solar system behind the so-called Kuiper belt. Dutch astronomer Jan Oort suggested its existence in 1950, from which it got its name. Scientists do not know much about the distance between us and it or its size, but it is believed that it extends a distance of up to to tens of trillions of kilometres.
Scientists assume that this cloud represents remnants of the initial planetary disk that formed around the sun 4.6 billion years ago, and then the planets arose at a relatively close distance from the sun, leaving the remnants of the cloud in the background of the solar system.
According to a press release issued by Western Canadian University, over the past 70 years of examining fireballs, this was the first time that a rocky fireball was burning in the earth's atmosphere coming from the Oort cloud.
In their new study, scientists point out that this discovery contradicts scientists' view of how the solar system originated, as the prevailing assumption was that the Oort cloud consists exclusively of icy bodies, and that rocky bodies are available the closer we get to the sun, up to the rocky planets from which the Earth is.
The researchers hope that this new data will contribute to raising the degree of interest in the study of fireballs, which could contribute - if the results are confirmed in the future with a greater number of "visitors" from the Oort cloud - in making radical adjustments to scientists' view of the initial conditions in which the solar system was formed.