Artistic illustration of a rogue planet MasPix/Alamy
The sun’s gravitational pull may be able to capture incoming objects from as far as 3.8 light years away, including interstellar comets and even rogue planets. That would make our solar system much bigger than previously thought.
The extent of our sun’s gravitational influence into the galaxy is unclear, but it seems to stretch at least to the Oort cloud, a sphere of trillions of icy objects that surrounds the sun at a distance of more than 1 light year. This is sometimes regarded as the outer edge of the…
