"We were quite surprised," Dones continued. "Spirals are seen in Saturn's rings, disks around young stars and galaxies. The ...

The mysterious Oort cloud is the source of many of our solar system's comets, but astronomers still have no idea what it looks like. Now, new simulations may have given them a first glimpse.

But for Oort cloud objects, it plays a major role in ... or separation of radiation from those objects that eliminates background and foreground sources so it could track the specific structure.

Previous research has suggested that the Oort cloud contains remnants of the solar system's planets, which were formed over 4 billion years ago, but its exact shape and structure have been a mystery.

The Oort cloud — the mysterious shell of icy objects ... or pick out the light reflected from them from all the other ...