On Earth we get to see a spectacular show every few years when a comet circling the sun comes within visual range. Astronomers tend to keep track of all the comets and most of the ones around the sun have been plotted out ages ago, although new stars are constantly being studied to see what comets go around them.

Each star is likely to have a couple of comets floating around it in an ecliptic orbit, but this star called Bata Pictoris really takes the cake with 500 comets going around it in orbit. It is located about63 light-years from the Sun. The astronomers using the The HARPS instrument at ESO’s La Silla Observatory in Chile are calling this the largest census of comets around another star ever created.

The comets have been categorized into two families based on the observations of speed, light, size and gas clouds around them. An older set of exocomets that have made multiple passages near the star, and another younger set exocomets that probably came from the recent breakup of one or more larger objects around the star. This study lasted from 2003 to 2011 and took into account more than a thousand observations. It has been a long and fulfilling science project.