Accidental find in planetarium show could shift scientists' understanding of our solar system

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Science Space
Accidental find in planetarium show could shift scientists’ understanding of our solar system

By Jacopo Prisco, CNN
7 minute read
Updated 7:55 PM EDT, Tue June 10, 2025


The Oort Cloud, an expanse of icy bodies in the far reaches of our solar system, is shown here in a scene from "Encounters in the Milky Way," a show at New York City's Hayden Planetarium that spawned an accidental discovery about the cloud's shape. AMNH

(CNN) — An accidental discovery might change how we think about one of the most mysterious structures in our solar system. … The Oort Cloud, a large expanse of icy bodies revolving around the sun at a distance 1,000 times greater than the orbit of Neptune, is widely thought to be spherical — although it has never been directly observed.

But during the preproduction of a show titled “Encounters in the Milky Way,” which debuted Monday at the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, a projection on the planetarium’s dome revealed something strange within the Oort Cloud: a spiral.

The curators were testing out a scene in September that includes a detailed view of Earth’s celestial neighborhood — from the sun to the solar system’s outer edges — and were surprised when they saw the structure, which looked coincidentally similar to a spiral galaxy such as our own.

“We hit play on the scene, and immediately we saw it. It was just there,” recalled Jackie Faherty, an astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History and the curator of the show. “I was confused and thought that was super weird. I didn’t know if it was an artifact, I didn’t know if it was real.”

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