(Öpik–Oort cloud) A cloud of comets that move in orbits round the Sun with perihelia in the range 5–50 AU and aphelia in a zone with heliocentric distances between 30 000 and 100 000 AU, i.e. in a zone far beyond Pluto's orbit. Since the nearest star to the Sun – Proxima Centauri – is 270 000 AU away these comets can be perturbed by passing stars; this changes their orbits and send them in closer toward our Sun (or out toward the perturbing star). These perturbed comets have periods of hundreds of thousands of years. The Oort cloud is so distant that it acts as a refrigerated cometary reservoir. The existence of a distant long-lived cloud of comets was first suggested in 1932 by Ernst Öpik. The same idea was proposed in 1950 by J.H. Oort who thought that comets originated from the disintegration of a planet some time in the early history of the Solar System. After this the major planets, Jupiter in particular, drove the majority of the comets either into the inner Solar System, where…