The Bosporus Star

The Oort cloud is a vast cloud of cometary matter somewhere beyond Pluto (from that distance, the sun would look like a bright star) named after Dutch astronomer Jan Oort, who, along with Estonian astronomer Ernst Öpik, helped conceptualize a comet reservoir, existing beyond all of our current data gathering technologies.

This is Richard Preston writing in the October 26, 1987 issue of the New Yorker:

|The extinction of the dinosaurs might have been heralded by a star shining during the day--a star passing through the Oort cloud--and by an unusual number of comets hanging in the dawns and sunsets, year after year. If an asteroid had hit the earth, there would have been no warning at all, except the presence of Jupiter in the sky, serene and delicious, and, as always, raking the asteroid belt. If it were not for Jupiter, perhaps, the dinosaurs might have become slim creatures examining quasars with mirrors, while today we would be balls of fur with saucer eyes, chewing insects and howling at the night.|