The Oort limit is a theoretical location at the outer limits of the Oort cloud, where the amount of comets and minor planets orbiting the Sun drops drastically, or drops entirely. The exact location of such a limit, if there is such one, is uncertain. About 100 comets, of 3500 known comets,[1] come more than 5000 AU from the Sun, and a very few come as far as 20,000 AU from the Sun. So far, it appears that rather than a sudden drop in the amount of comets orbiting the Sun at about 50,000 AU, the Oort cloud rather uniformly decreases in size, the further away from the Sun it goes. As current observations indicate, the Oort limit is somewhere around 50,000 AU (0.8 LY) from the Sun.
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This article is an automated import of the Wikipedia article "Oort limit", available at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oort_limit . Text is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.