Wikipedia is not the best place to find information on serious topics and especially not topics which court heated debates from people who have different points of view.
It is also a bit temperamental as a reference because things change each time someone makes an edit and what you are referencing may not be there next time someone goes looking for it.
So it is with reluctance that I link this topic on the Oort cloud to Wikipedia because I really ought to know better.
Surprisingly we Oort to know more about the Oort cloud but we don't. It's a hypothetical construct which has only been indirectly observed as an explanation of where long peroid comets and centaurs come from. It is thought to be spherical and isotropically distributed.
The mystery is understanding what mechanism dislodges comets from this theoretically isotropically distributed zone.
Editors on Wikipedia claim: "The outer Oort cloud is only loosely bound to the Solar System, and thus is easily affected by the gravitational pull both of passing stars and of the Milky Way Galaxy itself. These forces occasionally dislodge comets from their orbits within the cloud and send them towards the inner Solar System". I'm not entirely convinced.
Two people independently thought of this cloud as an explanation: Öpik and Oort. This is also interesting because there are many other instances where more than one person has independently come up with an idea at the same time. Is this an example of thought entanglement?
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