Who discovered the Oort Cloud?

The Oort Cloud will be the main topic of these series of blog posts and for the first blog today I will be talking a little bit about the man responsible for discovering the Oort Cloud, who is Jan Hendrik Oort.

Born April 28th, 1900, in Franeker, Netherlands Jan Hendrik Oort turned out to be one of the top astronomers of the 20th Century.  He was an astronomer for the Leiden Observatory from 1924-1970 and also served as director for a time. In 1927 he had an instrumental part in proving that Bertil Lindblad's theory that the Milky Way rotates around it's own plane around the center of the Galaxy, due in most part from his own observations and refined thw theory into what it is today. In 1932 he was the first person to uncover evidence on dark matter as well.

One of his most important and fascinating discoveries was his proposal that certain comets came from a large cloud of small icy bodies that orbit the Sun about 1 light year away. This cloud is a spherical cloud that encircles our whole Solar System. When passing stars interact with this cloud it alters some comets orbits so that they spiral towards the Sun or are sent out of our Solar System deep into Space.

Jan Hendrik Oort died in 1992 and is recognized for what he was a great astronomer as well as an innovator in radio astronomy.

Work Cited

Redd, Noah. "Oort Cloud: The Outer Solar System's Icy Shell." Space.com. N.p., 02 Jul 2012. Web. 1 Apr 2014. <http://www.space.com/16401-oort-cloud-the-outer-solar-system-s-icy-shell.html>.

Editor's of Britannica, . "Jan Hendrik Oort." Britannican.pag. Web. 1 Apr 2014. <http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/429497/Jan-Hendrik-Oort>.

N.d. Photograph. n.p. Web. 1 Apr 2014. <http://www.astro.virginia.edu/class/whittle/astr553/Topic01/t1_Oort.jpg>.