Now the comet has roughly equal chances of being captured into the inner Solar System, returning to the Oort cloud to continue in its current orbit of millions of years, or being ejected out of the Solar System entirely to become an interstellar comet. The Dutch-American astronomer Gerad Kuiper postulated a nearer band of comets, just outside the orbit of Neptune . Detailed calculations in the 1980s confirmed that the gravitational effects of the inner Solar System sweep the area clean of comets but, at the edge of the Solar System, a band of comets could congregate. This band, now called Kuiper's Belt , is apparently not affected in a major way by Pluto because of its relatively small mass. In an amazingly difficult series of observations, comets in the Kuiper belt have been observed with the Hubble Space Telescope.
Comets have interesting side effects.
Astronomical satellites designed to observe in the far infrared detected narrow strips across the sky. The dust, now moving along the comet orbit at slightly different speeds than the comet itself, has been heated by the Sun and glows weakly in the far infrared part of the spectrum. These comet streams contain particles larger than dust. If the orbit of the Earth intersects with the comet orbit, then, at the same date each year, the comet debris will plunge into Earth's atmosphere providing a delightful meteor shower . Most meteor showers are associated with known comets.