What is the Oort Cloud?
The Oort cloud is a huge spherical cloud of comets and dust that extends three light years from the Sun in all directions. The fact that the cloud is spherical rather than disc-shaped sets it apart from other collections of debris in the solar system, such as the asteroid and Kuiper belts. The sphere is so large that its edge is closer to our nearest star than to the sun itself. The edges of the Oort cloud generally represent the limits of the sun’s gravitational influence — comets that stray too far from the edge get lost into space and become interstellar wanderers. It is thought that almost every star has its own Oort cloud, of greater or lesser size. Oort clouds certainly overlap, and the Oort cloud of our sun likely overlaps with the cloud of Alpha Centauri. When the clouds overlap to the extent that the edge of a foreign cloud envelops another star, an above-average frequency of comets will be seen within the central regions of that star’s solar system. The Oort cloud was first
So what source of comets do evolutionists propose? Several sources have been suggested over the years, and have largely fallen into disfavour. For instance, nearly two centuries ago, Laplace suggested that comets might be interstellar, with comets occasionally passing near the inner Solar System so that they become visible and some would be captured. One would expect that at least a few comets would be observed approaching perihelion on hyperbolic paths. As mentioned previously, this is not the case, which is the main reason this model was largely abandoned. Apparently this difficulty can be explained, at least to the satisfaction of its few adherents today (see, for example, Witkowski6). Another suggested source of comets is by volcanic ejection from planets and their satellites (Vsekhsvyatskij7). An obvious problem with this idea is that comets appear to share a common composition, a property that is not true of the alleged parent bodies. Another problem is the difficulty of ejected
