Is the Oort-Opik cloud a spherical shell or a banded ring around the Solar System?

by pennstatelive
Question by Golgi Apparatus: Is the Oort-Opik cloud a spherical shell or a banded ring around the Solar System?
According to the Observer book of Space, it is a 'sperical shell' encapsulating the Solar System, replete with '10 trillion comets.'

I always imagined it to be a band, similar to Saturn's rings, aligned with the horizontal placement of the other planets. 10 trillion comets sounds like an exageration, too.

Thoughts?


Best answer:
Answer by eelfinsThe Oort cloud is a spherical shell of comets, extending almost half the way to the nearest star, according to someone I can't remember. The Kuiper belt is a toroid-shaped band of debris just inside the Oort cloud, and starting just outside the orbit of Neptune. Maybe that's what you're thinking of.

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(PROPERTY OF USTREAM) The moon will start eating away at the sun's disk around 5 pm ET today — although that's early Monday morning in Asia, where the eclipse begins. A wide swath of the world between south China and the American Midwest will see a partial solar eclipse, due to the moon's position between Earth and sun. And along a roughly 200-mile-wide track, skywatchers can witness a "Ring of Fire," in which just a thin ring of the sun's disk remains uncovered. There'll be no total eclipse this time around, because the moon is too far away in orbit to match the sun's apparent size. Nevertheless, it's a sight not to be missed. (MSNBC (C) cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com

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