What's causing comets, the Kuiper belt or the Oort cloud?

Question

In my space book, it says that comets come from a cloud far from Pluto that is making comets. It also says that it might come from the Kuiper Belt, a belt past Pluto?

Answer 1

Periodic comets (those that come around every few years or few decades) are thought to be Kuiper Belt objects that get perturbed into the inner solar system. Other comets, such as Hale-Bopp, that will not return for thousands of years, if ever, are hypothesized to originate in a spherical shell of comets called the Oort Cloud or Öpik-Oort Cloud, out around 50,000 AU from the Sun.

One reason astronomers think there are two separate populations of objects that become comets is that periodic comets are found mostly close to the ecliptic plane, while the orientations of long-period orbits are distributed randomly.

The belts are not "making comets" - the comets all formed early in the development of the solar systems, along with the planets and asteroids.

Answer 2

The Kuiper Belt is a belt of icy objects outside the orbit of Neptune, of which Pluto, Charon, Eris, and Makemake are members of. It is fairly close to the planets of the solar system, unlike the Oort Cloud. The Oort Cloud is a larger cloud of objects surrounding the Sun about 1 light year from the center of the solar sytem that consists of icy objects. Every so often the gravitation of another star will disturb the orbit of an Oort Cloud object, and it will "fall" toward the Sun and become a comet. The Kuiper Belt is well known to exist, but the Oort Cloud is more hypothetical. Sedna may be part of the inner Oort Cloud.

Answer 3

The Oort cloud does not make comets. It isn't even a cloud in the sense you may be thinking. It is more like a swarm of comets lurking far out past Pluto, and only occasionally does one come close to the Sun. This is because objects in elliptical orbits move slower at the high point of their orbit and faster at the low point. For a comet in a very elliptical orbit, it spends very little time near the Sun and a very long time out past Pluto. Jan Oort supposed that there must be many comets lurking so far away where we can't see them even with the biggest telescope. So many comets that they are almost like a cloud of comets surrounding the Sun, so Jan Oort called it a cloud of comets and it is now called the Oort cloud in his honor.

The Kuiper belt is another asteroid belt, like the one between Mars and Jupiter, but it is out past Neptune. Pluto is actually a member of this belt, it isn't considered a planet any more. The Kuiper belt is much closer to the Sun than the Oort cloud.

Answer 4

There is no cloud "making" comets. What is out beyond Pluto is a vast amount of debris left over from when the solar system formed. In other words, there was a period of time of planet formation, about 5 billion years ago. The sun then did a little house cleaning job through a solar phenomenon know as the T-Tauri Wind. It is a blast of solar pressure that blew all the leftover rocks and balls of dirty ice out of the solar system, leaving the 9 planets (now 8) and an asteroid belt (which is probably what's left over from a moon that got too close to Jupiter and was broken up by Jupiter's gravity). So this area of left over stuff also rotates around the sun, but the orbits are highly elliptical (or "unusual" if you prefer that term). This means that from time to time the orbit of a comet (a dirty ball of ice) or a meteor (rock) will pass close to the sun and by the same token, pass close to us. If it passes REALLY close to us, it is classified as a Near-Earth object and is a cause of concern for reasons that are obvious if you've ever seen the movie Armageddon.

The Oort "cloud" is a vast region of space beyond Pluto extending almost half way to the nearest star, Proxima Centauri. The Kuiper belt is a belt of asteroids and small planetoids like Pluto that lies on the inner fringes of the Oort cloud. These things are simply named after the people that discovered them.

Answer 5

Susan got it the wrong way round.

As I understand it, all comets come originally from the Oort cloud, which is a hangover from the creation of the Solar System (they are material than never got made into planets etc because they are too far out and spread out to have gravitationally accreted.

The theory is that sometimes they are upset by some gravitaitonal disturbance, and some get shot out of their cloud, and a few of those head for the inner solar system.

In the inner Solar System they get captured by the sun's gravity and sometimes by the larger planets. As I understand it, the comets of the Kuiper belt originally came from the Oort Cloud.

Note that the Oort cloud is hundred to thousands of times as far out as the Kuiper belt.

Read Carl Sagan's book, Comet. That will tell you all you need to know in easy to read style.

Answer 6

Short term comets are from the Oort cloud. Long term comets are from the Kuiper belt.
Read about it at Nasa.gov

Around a dozen "new" comets are discovered each year. Short-period comets are more predictable because they take less than 200 years to orbit the Sun. Most come from a region of icy bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune. These icy bodies are variously called Kuiper Belt Objects, Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt Objects, or trans-Neptunian objects. Less predictable are long-period comets, many of which arrive from a distant region called the Oort cloud about 100,000 astronomical units (that is, 100,000 times the mean distance between Earth and the Sun) from the Sun. These comets can take as long as 30 million years to complete one trip around the Sun. (It takes Earth only 1 year to orbit the Sun.) As many as a trillion comets may reside in the Oort cloud, orbiting the Sun near the edge of the Sun's gravitational influence.

**EDIT
As nick S pointed out, I got it backwards..... short term are from the Kuiper.... Long term are from the Oort

Answer 7

The Oort cloud was invented as a proposed source of short-lived comets. There is no experimental evidence that it exists.
the Kuiper belt is similar. It includes known objects such as pluto, but is also alleged to be the source of short-lived comets - again with no actual evidence.

They are both attempts by evolutionists to explain why short-lived comets exist. This is a serious problem for them.
If the universe is in fact young, then it is no surprise that there are short-lived comets, though still interesting to speculate as to how/why they cam about.

http://www.creationontheweb.com/content/view/1558

Answer 8

The Oort cloud is the source of most comets. When the planets and the sun create a tug, usually by synergistic gravity (when they line up) a coma will start to head towards the sun. When it get to about the Martian orbit, a tail forms and it becomes a comet.

Answer 9

Comets form in the outter regions of the solar system.Lighter particles gather farther from the sun.If I studied correctly.Look it up at nasa.com.