Abstract
Comets are believed to have been formed at the same time that the sun and planets were created out of a rotating disc of gas and dust some 4.5 billion years ago. It is thought that they presently exist in the Oort cloud, a region of space beyond the outer planets [Oort, 1950] that extends to 105 Astronomical Units (AU) from the sun (1 AU is the distance from the sun to the earth, or 1.5×108 km). Calculations indicate that there are ∼1012 comets, of which a half dozen per year get injected into the solar system by the gravitational forces of passing stars. Comets may be the most pristine, least processed solar nebula material available to study within our solar system.
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