Our solar system has a giant icy shell
The Oort Cloud, a vast, icy shell surrounding our solar system, is the distant source of long-period comets and marks the outer limit of the Sun's gravitational influence.
Far beyond the planets, our solar system is encased in a vast, spherical cloud of icy objects called the Oort Cloud. Proposed in 1950, this distant region marks where the Sun's gravitational pull begins to fade against the Milky Way's forces. It stretches an incredible distance, over a light-year away at its outer edge, containing trillions of icy remnants from the solar system's birth 4.6 billion years ago.
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