Showing posts with label Oort. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Oort. Show all posts

Tuesday, March 31, 2026

How big is oort cloud?

 Oort cloud is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to the oort cloud.

Earth is 150 million kilometers from Sun. This is called 1 AU.

Imagine a sphere, as wide as Earth's orbit. It's big. So big, that light will take ~ 17 minutes to get from one edge to the other. Let's call it an Earth sphere.

Neptune orbits 4.5 billion kilometers away from the Sun. A sphere as wide as neptune's orbit (or Neptune sphere, if you will), would contain 20,000 Earth spheres.

The Oort cloud, a spherical region full of comets and icy bodies, starts from ~2000 AU away from Sun, and extends as far as ~100,000 AU. (This is an estimate).

At that size, it would contain 27 billion neptune spheres.

It's so large, that light will take ~3 years to get from one edge to the other.