Dr. Katherine Volk

So people have looked at, so kind of a self-gravity effect, where maybe if they're gravitationally affecting each other, they could kind of align themselves.

So it'd be extremely unlikely to have kind of a cloud of Kuiper objects orbiting the sun.

But one thing we often do neglect is the effect of self-gravity.

but estimates are that you'd need quite a bit more mass in Kuiper Belt objects for that to be an important effect so maybe that's something that went on in the early solar system but it's not super likely to be important now although I will say our mass estimates for how much stuff there is in the Kuiper Belt for the very distant part is very uncertain because the observational biases are very bad against observing small things

So I can't totally rule out that self-gravity and effects like that are important, but they're probably not a driver here.

It's more likely that it is one or two.

For the warped plane, it could be two objects or something, but the more objects you add, the more their gravitational effects would kind of cancel out.

So it's probably not a huge group of objects causing any of these effects.

So people think maybe occultations could work for observing Oort cloud objects.

In terms of directly observing, the answer is never.

But maybe through stellar occultations you could observe things.

But it still remains that our best probe of the Oort cloud is seeing the stuff that comes in.

So the Oort cloud is about 10,000 AU from the sun, roughly.

So these are things where they are bound to the sun, they're orbiting the sun, but really loosely.

So the effects of the other stars in our galaxy and the galactic tidal effects are important.

And that's why they're kind of this cloud of objects that have been torqued in all directions.

And those outside forces sometimes kick them into the inner solar system as long-period comets.

So that remains our best probe.

I mean, we do observe Oort cloud objects in the form of those long-period comets.

But in terms of observing something in the Oort cloud itself,