If the Ort Cloud completley surrounds the solar system, how is it that we can see the stars?

Answer 1

It is very very sparse. There's not enough material out there to make a decent-sized planet, and it's spread out over an incredibly huge volume of space.

Answer 2

Because it is so sparsely populated. It is mostly empty space. Just like you can see right through the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. There may be lots of asteroids, but space is so big that even if you were right in the middle of it, you would see nothing at all. You would have to go looking for the nearest asteroid and when you found it, all the other asteroids would be too far away to see. And there would be plenty of places in the belt were there would be no asteroid close enough to see. The same with the Oort cloud. You could be right in the middle of it and hardly ever get close enough to see a comet. It is hard to imagine how big and empty space is compared to how small comets are so you have to do the math. Assume the cloud extends for 1 trillion miles in all directions from the Sun. That is about 1/6 of a light year or about 1/8 of the way to the closest other star. Calculate the volume of that sphere as 4/3*Pi*R^3 to get 4E36 cubic miles in it. Then assume there are 100 billion comets evenly distributed in that sphere, so each one occupies a 100 billionth of the volume, or 4E25 cubic miles. Take the cube root of that to find that those 100 billion comets are an average of 350 million miles apart. THINK OF IT! 100 billion comets, each only about 10 miles in size, spread out so far that no two are closer to each other than 350 MILLION miles! That is how big space is! Mind bogglingly, unbelievable gigantic! You cannot use gut feeling for it. The human mind cannot grasp it! The numbers are ASTRONOMICAL!

Answer 3

The key to explaining the apparent paradox is locked up in the word "completely".

There are more gaps in the Ort Cloud than there are objects. In fact the gaps are so much more gap than object that the amount of the sky blocked by the objects in the Ort Cloud is a very small portion of a percent of the sky.

Answer 4

You know interstellar dust? The Ort Cloud is maybe less dense than half the density of interstellar dust.

Answer 5

In the same way that you can see things through a flywire screen; it is not a cloud like a raincloud, but more like a cloud of insects, but composed of many thousands of chunks of matter, disrtibuted over a huge volume of space.

Answer 6

its not a solid mass, its big, and is filled with problly millions of objects but the space is so large they occupy tand they are spread out.