PARIS Astronomers using an ultra-sensitive telescope in the Chilean desert said Wednesday they had mapped hundreds of comets orbiting a star 63 light-years from Earth.

The feat marks the most complete census of so-called exocomets, or comets in other solar systems, they said.

Comets shed ice, gas and dust as they near a star like our sun, creating one or more tails.

Astrophysicists are keen on them for other reasons.

Comets are believed to be ancient remnants left from the building of our solar system some 4.6 billion years ago.

Previous work has found that other stars, too, have comets.

But it has been extremely difficult to get a more detailed picture.

Comets are tiny relative to the size of their star, and their tail is swamped by the starlight, which makes it hard to identify them and calculate their orbit.

Reporting in the journal Nature, a French-led team pored over nearly 1,000 observations of a youthful star, Beta Pictoris, that were made over a period of eight years.

The images were taken with a highly sensitive instrument, HARPS, at the European Southern Observatorys La Silla facility in Chiles bone-dry Atacama desert.

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In a first, astronomers map comets around another star