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What did Jan Hendrik Oort do?

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He confirmed (1927) Bertil Lindblad's theory of the Milky Way galaxy's rotation. In the 1950s he and his colleagues used radio astronomical means to map the spiral-arm structure of the galaxy. Oort proposed (1950) that comets originate in a cloud of material (the Oort cloud ) orbiting the sun at great distance and that they are occasionally deflected into the inner solar system by gravitational perturbation from the passing of nearby stars.

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Get more facts and information about Oort, Jan Hendrik . Or, view the full encyclopedia entry from The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition.

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