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The galaxy's tidal wobble is, they think, being modulated by the gravity of something big within the Oort cloud itself.
ECONOMIST: X marks the spot
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Only when a comet arriving from the Oort cloud has its orbit tweaked by a close encounter with a planet does it settle into a more regular existence.
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Whitmire notes that Sedna, thought by some to be an inner Oort Cloud object, may have also been perturbed by Tyche, since Sedna has an orbit well beyond that of Neptune.
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But the reason that they come near the sun at all is because their original orbits, which kept them in the distant realm of the Oort cloud, had been somehow disturbed.
ECONOMIST: X marks the spot
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Cheng says the comet is likely making its first visit to the inner solar system from the Oort cloud, a reservoir of hundreds of millions of comets encircling our solar system at a distance of about a light year.
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Long-period comets can arrive from any direction in space and are believed to originate in the Oort cloud (a reservoir of comets encircling the sun, the existence of which was worked out at the same time as the Kuiper belt by Jan Oort, a Dutch astronomer).
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At Oort-cloud distances, the strength of this combined gravity adds up to the same sort of force as that exerted by the solar gravitational field, enfeebled as it is by its remoteness from the sun.
ECONOMIST: X marks the spot