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- A comet would be represented by a year and a small letter indicating the order of discovery or recovery in the year, or a year plus Roman numeral indicating the order of perihelion passage (ie, point in the orbit nearest the sun) in that year.
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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.
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comet, a small body orbiting the Sun with a substantial fraction of its composition made up of volatile ices. When a comet comes close to the Sun, the ices sublimate (go directly from the solid to the gas phase) and form, along with entrained dust particles, a bright outflowing atmosphere around the comet nucleus known as a coma. As dust and gas in...
Comets are among the most-spectacular objects in the sky, with their bright glowing comae and their long dust tails and ion tails. Comets can appear at random from any direction and provide a fabulous and ever-changing display for many months as they move in highly eccentric orbits around the Sun.
Comets are important to scientists because they are primitive bodies left over from the formation of the solar system. They were among the first solid bodies to form in the solar nebula, the collapsing interstellar cloud of dust and gas out of which the Sun and planets formed. Comets formed in the outer regions of the solar nebula where it was cold enough for volatile ices to condense. This is generally taken to be beyond 5 astronomical units (AU; 748 million km, or 465 million miles), or beyond the orbit of Jupiter. Because comets have been stored in distant orbits beyond the planets, they have undergone few of the modifying processes that have melted or changed the larger bodies in the solar system. Thus, they retain a physical and chemical record of the primordial solar nebula and of the processes involved in the formation of planetary systems.
A comet is made up of four visible parts: the nucleus, the coma, the ion tail, and the dust tail. The nucleus is a solid body typically a few kilometres in diameter and made up of a mixture of volatile ices (predominantly water ice) and silicate and organic dust particles. The coma is the freely escaping atmosphere around the nucleus that forms when the comet comes close to the Sun and the volatile ices sublimate, carrying with them dust particles that are intimately mixed with the frozen ices in the nucleus. The dust tail forms from those dust particles and is blown back by solar radiation pressure to form a long curving tail that is typically white or yellow in colour. The ion tail forms from the volatile gases in the coma when they are ionized by ultraviolet photons from the Sun and blown away by the solar wind. Ion tails point almost exactly away from the Sun and glow bluish in colour because of the presence of CO+ ions.
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Comets differ from other bodies in the solar system in that they are generally in orbits that are far more eccentric than those of the planets and most asteroids and far more inclined to the ecliptic (the plane of Earth’s orbit). Some comets appear to come from distances of over 50,000 AU, a substantial fraction of the distance to the nearest stars. Their orbital periods can be millions of years in length. Other comets have shorter periods and smaller orbits that carry them from the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn inward to the orbits of the terrestrial planets. Some comets even appear to come from interstellar space, passing around the Sun on open, hyperbolic orbits, but in fact are members of the solar system.
Jul 9, 2024 · Comets are large objects made of dust and ice that orbit the Sun. Best known for their long, streaming tails, these ancient objects are leftovers from the formation of the solar system 4.6 billion years ago. Comets, such as the comet ISON pictured here, are thought to hold material from the time when the Sun and planets were forming.
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...
Jan 6, 2023 · The first modern description of a comet nucleus was suggested by Fred Whipple in the 1950s. In his model, a comet was a more or less uniform body that he called an “icy conglomerate,” composed...
Comets are frozen leftovers from the formation of the solar system composed of dust, rock, and ices. They range from a few miles to tens of miles wide, but as they orbit closer to the Sun, they heat up and spew gases and dust into a glowing head that can be larger than a planet.
Feb 6, 2006 · A comet would be represented by a year and a small letter indicating the order of discovery or recovery in the year, or a year plus Roman numeral indicating the order of perihelion passage (ie, point in the orbit nearest the sun) in that year.
