The Oort cloud is a shell of icy bodies that surrounds the solar system. ... Most objects that orbit the sun orbit on the same plane, like the planets, the asteroid belt and the Kuiper Belt.

It's the Oort Cloud, named after Jan Hendrik Oort. Unlike our local asteroid belt, and the more distant Kuiper Belt, which form orbiting bands, this is an enormous spherical cloud.

They're part of a new class of asteroid belt objects that, unlike asteroids, show a comet-like halo and tail. Photo: NASA/ESA/CSA/J. Olmsted/M. Kelley Among the first such objects to be discovered ...

The identity of this presumed cloud is not fully known, but scientists strongly believe that it is a source of long-period comets (LPCs) that enter the inner solar system from time to time and can ...

Despite the difficulty, astronomers have been searching the Oort cloud (and the nearer Kuiper Belt) for decades, in the hopes of finding the elusive “hypothetical Planet X.” ...

From the icy comets that journey through the outer reaches to the rocky asteroids that populate the asteroid belt, ... The existence of the Oort Cloud was proposed by Jan Oort in 1950.

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These "dirty snowballs," as they're often called, originate from two primary sources: the nearby Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune and the more distant Oort Cloud, a spherical shell of icy objects that ...

The Oort cloud's inner edge sits as far as 5,000 astronomical units from the sun, and its outer edge is as far as 100,000 AU away. One AU is 93 million miles, the average distance from Earth to ...

Astronomers have long been intrigued by the makeup of the asteroid belt’s largest body. When it was first spotted in 1801, Ceres appeared dry and rocky, its surface marked by craters and dents.