As the Galactic tide acts to decouple bodies from the scattered disk it creates a spiral structure in physical space that is roughly 15,000 au in length.

The spiral is long-lived and persists in the inner Oort cloud to the present time. In the pre-peer-reviewed paper ‘A Spiral Structure in the Inner Oort Cloud‘ scientists at the Southwest Research Institute discuss dynamics underlying the Oort spiral and (feeble) prospects for its observational detection.