| Abstract: | The past dozen years have produced a new paradigm with regard to the source regions of comets in the early solar system. It
is now widely recognized that the likely source of the Jupiter-family short-period comets (those with Tisserand parameters,
T > 2 and periods, P, generally < 20 years) is the Kuiper belt in the ecliptic plane beyond Neptune. In contrast, the source
of the Halley-type and long-period comets (those with T < 2 and P > 20 years) appears to be the Oort cloud. However, the comets
in the Oort cloud almost certainly originated elsewhere, since accretion is very inefficient at such large heliocentric distances.
New dynamical studies now suggest that the source of the Oort cloud comets is the entire giant planets region from Jupiter
to Neptune, rather than primarily the Uranus-Neptune region, as previously thought. Some fraction of the Oort cloud population
may even be asteroidal bodies formed inside the orbit of Jupiter. These comets and asteroids underwent a complex dynamical
random walk among the giant planets before they were ejected to distant orbits in the Oort cloud, with possible interesting
consequences for their thermal and collisional histories. Observational evidence for diversity in cometary compositions is
limited, at best.
This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date. |
