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Loading contentThe icy small bodies of the Solar System — what comets are, where they come from, how they were explored, and how they connect to the meteor showers. Built on real MPC/JPL data that reuses the platform's comets, meteor showers, missions, and the asteroid encyclopedia's trans-Neptunian reservoirs; nothing is fabricated.
A short-period comet (1P/Halley) that returns to the inner Solar System roughly every 76 years.
The most numerous class of periodic comets, whose orbits are shepherded by Jupiter and which originate in the scattered disc beyond Neptune.
A hypothesised spherical cloud of trillions of icy bodies at the outermost edge of the Sun's gravitational influence — the reservoir from which long-period and Halley-type comets are nudged inward.
A family of sungrazing comets on very similar orbits, thought to be the fragments of a single giant comet that broke apart many centuries ago. They include some of the brightest comets in history and are discovered in large numbers by solar spacecraft.