‘Comets and planets’

Comets are leftovers from the era of the formation of the solar system stored at large distances to the sun for billions of years. By chance, some of these bodies penetrate into the inner regions of the solar system allowing us to study pristine building blocks of our own planetary system. While many comets have been observed in history, the ESA Rosetta mission is providing us with the unique opportunity to meet one of them up very close. In this lecture, some results of this extraordinary mission together with the more general question of the origin of comets and their role in the formation and evolution of planets are presented and discussed.