Beyond the planets themselves, the solar system is defined by its distant, icy frontiers: the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud. The Kuiper Belt, a donut-shaped region of icy objects just past Neptune, is home to dwarf planets and serves as the source for many short-period comets. Far beyond that lies the Oort Cloud, a theoretical, spherical shell of frozen debris that marks the very edge of the Sun’s gravitational influence. These outer reaches act as a “cosmic freezer,” preserving ancient materials from the dawn of our solar system roughly 4.6 billion years ago, offering scientists a window into the raw ingredients that originally formed our celestial home.
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