Part 2/15:
The story of the Oort Cloud begins with Dutch astronomer Jan Hendrik Oort in 1950. While studying long-period comets—those that take thousands or millions of years to orbit the Sun—Oort noticed an intriguing pattern: these comets seemed to appear from all directions in space, without any preferred origin. This isotropic distribution suggested the existence of a spherical reservoir of icy bodies surrounding the Solar System.