. . . during the preproduction of a
show titled “Encounters in the Milky Way,” which debuted Monday at the Hayden Planetarium in New York City, a projection on the planetarium’s dome revealed something strange within the Oort Cloud: a spiral.
. . .
“We hit play on the scene, and immediately we saw it. It was just there,” recalled Jackie Faherty, an astrophysicist at the American Museum of Natural History and the curator of the show. “I was confused and thought that was super weird. I didn’t know if it was an artifact, I didn’t know if it was real.”
. . .
To investigate, Faherty got in touch with David Nesvorny, an institute scientist with the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado, and the Oort Cloud expert who had provided scientific data for the scene.
“We didn’t create it — David did,” Faherty said. “This is David’s simulation, and it’s grounded in physics. It has a totally good physical explanation for why it should be there.”
At first, Nesvorny suspected artifacts — abnormalities or distortions in the data visualization — but once he looked at his data, he confirmed the presence of the spiral and eventually published a scientific paper about the discovery in April in
The Astrophysical Journal. “Weird way to discover things,” he said. “I should know my data better, after years of working with it.”