SOLAR SYSTEM

Detailed explanation-1: -Answer: Comets are believed to have two sources. Long-period comets (those which take more than 200 years to complete an orbit around the Sun) originate from the Oort Cloud. Short-period comets (those which take less than 200 years to complete an orbit around the Sun) originate from the Kuiper Belt.

Detailed explanation-2: -Where Do Comets Come From? It is thought that most comets originate in a vast cloud of ice and dust that surrounds the solar system. The Oort Cloud, as it is called, extends several thousand times farther from the Sun than Pluto, the outermost planet.

Detailed explanation-3: -In short, gravity from the planets shoved many icy planetesimals away from the Sun, and gravity from the galaxy likely caused them to settle in the borderlands of the solar system, where the planets couldn’t perturb them anymore. And they became what we now call the Oort Cloud.

Detailed explanation-4: -The objects in the Oort Cloud and in the Kuiper Belt are presumed to be remnants from the formation of the solar system about 4.6 billion years ago.

Detailed explanation-5: -The short-period comets are found near the ecliptic, which means they are orbiting the Sun in same plane as the planets. The short-period comets are thought to originate in the Kuiper Belt, an area outside Neptune’s orbit (from about 30 to 50 AU) that has many icy comet-like objects.