The Aurigids originate from C/1911 N1 Kiess, or comet Kiess, a long-period comet that takes about 2000 years to orbit the Sun.

Long period comets (with periods greater than 200 years) are believed to originate from the Oort cloud, a spherical cloud of small bodies (comets), situated about 50 to 50,000 AU from the Sun (1 Astronomical Unit is equal to the distance of Earth from the Sun, or approximately 150 million km). It is thought to be a remnant of the original protoplanetary disc that formed around the Sun, about 4.6 thousand million years ago.