The Oort Cloud is a vast, spherical reservoir of icy objects enveloping our Solar System like a cosmic snow globe, extending from roughly 2,000 to 100,000 astronomical units from the Sun. Named after Dutch astronomer Jan Oort who proposed its existence in 1950, this distant region remains hypothetical since no objects have been directly observed there due to the extreme distances involved.</p><p>This primordial collection of frozen remnants from the Solar System's formation contains an estimated one trillion icy bodies, ranging from small chunks to objects hundreds of kilometers across. When gravitational disturbances from passing stars or galactic forces nudge these "dirty snowballs" toward the inner Solar System, they become the spectacular long-period comets we observe, such as Hale-Bopp (orbital period: 2,533 years) and the famous Halley's Comet (76-year period, though it likely originates from the closer Kuiper Belt).</p><p>The Oort Cloud's significance extends beyond comet production—it represents a frozen archive of the Solar System's earliest materials, preserving pristine samples from 4.6 billion years ago. Understanding this region helps astronomers piece together planetary formation theories and explains the seemingly random arrival directions of long-period comets. The cloud's outer boundary may mark where our Sun's gravitational influence yields to interstellar forces, defining the true edge of our Solar System.