the.com/distant ice

the frozen shoulder of the solar system, where comets go to sulk until gravity notices them.

means a colloquial term for icy bodies far out in the solar system, like Kuiper Belt objects and Oort Cloud comets, that formed or drifted beyond the reach of the sun's warmth.

from not a strict scientific term but a descriptive phrase astronomers use for trans-Neptunian ice, tracing back to Gerard Kuiper's 1951 hypothesis and Jan Oort's 1950 cloud, both proposing frozen leftovers from planet formation lurking at the solar system's edge.

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