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A comet is an icy, small Solar System body that warms and begins to release gases when passing close to the Sun, a process called outgassing. This produces an extended, gravitationally unbound atmosphere or coma surrounding the nucleus, and sometimes a tail of gas and dust gas blown out from the coma.
Sep 12, 2023 · There's a newly discovered comet in the sky, and it's about to make its closest flyby of Earth. Comet Nishimura (C/2023 P1) will zip past the planet at a distance of roughly 125 million...
Jul 9, 2024 · Comets, such as the comet ISON pictured here, are thought to hold material from the time when the Sun and planets were forming. They are like giant, frozen time capsules in our solar system. Credit: NASA/MSFC/Aaron Kingery.
Comets are cosmic snowballs of frozen gases, rock, and dust that orbit the Sun. When frozen, they are the size of a small town. When a comet's orbit brings it close to the Sun, it heats up and spews dust and gases into a giant glowing head larger than most planets. The dust and gases form a tail that stretches away from the Sun for millions of ...
Jul 15, 2014 · Just what is a comet, exactly? Comets, the solar system's dirty snowballs, are suspected to be one of the remnants of planet formation.
5 days ago · Comet, a small body orbiting the Sun with a substantial fraction of its composition made up of volatile ices. Comets are among the most-spectacular objects in the sky, with their bright glowing comae and their long tails.
Jul 31, 2023 · Comets are defined as icy bodies of frozen gases, rocks and dust left over from the formation of the solar system about 4.6 billion years ago. They orbit the sun in highly elliptical orbits that...
A comet warms up as it nears the Sun and develops an atmosphere, or coma. The Sun's heat causes the comet's ices to change to gases so the coma gets larger. The coma may extend hundreds of thousands of kilometers.
Jan 6, 2023 · The dynamical class of a comet refers to the reservoir from which it was perturbed into the inner solar system. The two major groups are the short-period comets (SPCs), with orbital periods up...
Jun 7, 2000 · What Are Comets? * Comets are small, fragile, irregularly shaped bodies composed of a mixture of grains and frozen gases. They have highly elliptical orbits that repeatedly bring them very close to the Sun and then swing them deeply into space, often beyond the orbit of Pluto.
