My guess is that if the universe ended at the Oort Cloud, eff would
still equal em-ae and the Earth would still circle the Sun
This from a non-creationist website. I have highlighted the words
that show that the Oort Cloud is pure conjecture but given the status
of being a fact (no maybe about it) in other websites.
In 1950 Jan Oort noticed that
1. no comet has been observed with an orbit that indicates that it
came from interstellar space,
2. there is a strong tendency for aphelia of long period comet
orbits to lie at a distance of about 50,000 AU, and
3. there is no preferential direction from which comets come.
>From this he proposed that comets reside in a vast cloud at the outer
reaches of the solar system. This has come to be known as the Oort
Cloud. The statistics imply that it may contain as many as a trillion
(1e12) comets. Unfortunately, since the individual comets are so small
and at such large distances, we have no direct evidence about the Oort
Cloud.
The Oort Cloud may account for a significant fraction of the mass of
the solar system, perhaps as much or even more than Jupiter. (This is
highly speculative, however; we don't know how many comets there are
out there nor how big they are.)
In 2004, the discovery of an object known as 2003 VB12 "Sedna" was
announced. Its orbit is intermediate between the Kuiper Belt and what
was previously thought to be the inner part of the Oort Cloud. Perhaps
this object is the first of a new class of "inner Oort Cloud" objects.
This is from a creationist website.
Comets are continually being lost through decay, collisions with
planets, and ejections from the solar system. If the solar system were
billions of years old, then all comets would have long ago ceased to
exist if they were not continually being replaced. Thus to sustain
long-age thinking, a way is needed to ‘resupply’ the solar system with
comets from time to time.
For years, evolutionary astronomers have believed that long-period
comets (those with orbital periods of more than 200 years) come from
the so-called ‘Oort cloud’. The Oort cloud supposedly contains
billions of comet nuclei orbiting the sun thousands of times further
from it than the Earth. Astronomers think that the gravity of an
occasional passing star or other object, or possibly a galactic tide,
causes comets from the Oort cloud to fall into the inner solar system.
This mechanism supposedly supplies the influx of comets needed to
overcome the conclusion that the solar system is young.
There are problems with the Oort cloud, the greatest being that there
is absolutely no evidence that it even exists!1 However, a recent
study has revealed a new problem.2 Evolutionary theories of the origin
of the solar system state that comet nuclei came from material left
over from the formation of the planets. According to the theory, this
icy material was sent out to the Oort cloud in the outer reaches of
the solar system by the gravity of the newly formed planets. All of
the earlier studies ignored collisions between the comet nuclei during
this process.
This new study has considered these collisions and has found that most
of the comets would have been destroyed by the collisions. Thus,
instead of having a combined mass of perhaps 40 Earths, the Oort cloud
should have at most the mass of about a single Earth. It is doubtful
that this is enough mass to account for the comets that we see. The
researchers postulate ‘escape valves’3 that could supply up to 3.5
Earth masses, but this is still ‘low compared to recent estimates of
the mass of the Oort cloud’. They go on to ‘speculate that a distant
source region for Oort cloud comets’3 could resolve some other
problems [emphasis added].
Of course, if the solar system is much younger than most astronomers
think, then there is no need for the Oort comet cloud. Since it cannot
be detected, the Oort cloud is not a scientific concept. This is not
bad science, but non-science masquerading as science. The existence of
comets is good evidence that the solar system is only a few thousand
years old, just as the recent-creation model suggests.4
