A comet is categorized as an icy body that discharges gas or dust. Most comets that are visible from earth seem to travel in long ovals around the sun. Comets consist of a nucleus which is bounded by fuzzy or cloudy atmosphere and it might have a tail or two. The gases in the comet’s coma and tail are bright reflective so that allows us to see comets a lot better when they are closer to the sun. Astronomers also trust that comets release the energy they store from the sun causing them to glow.
Astronomers trust that comets are leftovers of ice, rocks and gas from what shaped the planets billions of years ago. They also trust comets are strongly linked to life on earth, bringing some of the water and carbon based molecules that fuels life on soil.
When astronomers reflect about the nucleus of the comet they reflect about a dirty snowball. It’s basically a ball of ice and rocky dust particles. The coma forms when the sun comes nearer to the sun and some of the ice gets vaporized forming the cloudy dust around the comet. The sun’s radiation also pushes the dust particles away from the comet and that’s how the tail is shaped. Each time a comet orbits and come to the inner circle of the Solar system it melts a bit more s eventually some of the comets will be unable to find completely melt.
Astronomers categorize comets into two groups. Short and long period comets due to the time they take to orbit the sun. Short period comets take less than two hundred years while long period comets take two hundred or more years. Astronomers doubt that short-period comets come from the Kuiper belt which is basically a band of objects close to Pluto’s orbit. They believe that the gravitational pull of the planets can cause an object to be ...
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...d close-range reflection where space probes fly within close ranges of the asteroids and collect detailed data.
It is also a continuing theory that perhaps an asteroid crashed into earth which caused a climatic and environmental changes causing dinosaurs are extinct. The asteroid is trusted to have made a huge depression in Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. Asteroids are categorized into a number of types according to their spectra. C-type, includes more than seven five percent of known asteroids: tremendously dark; similar to carbonaceous chondrite meteorites; approximately the same chemical arrangement as the Sun minus hydrogen, helium and other volatiles; S-type, seventeen percent: relatively bright; metallic nickel-iron assorted with iron- and magnesium-silicates; M-type, most of the rest: bright; pure nickel-iron. There are also a dozen or so additional rare types.
A comet is a small icy body that travels in an elliptical orbit around the sun. Halley’s Comet, or 1P/Halley, is the most well-known “periodic” comet that orbits the solar system and returns to Earth’s vicinity approximately every seventy-six years. It is one of the only comets that can be seen from Earth that is visible to the naked-eye, and can appear twice in one’s lifetime. The comet’s last visit was in the year 1986, and it is calculated to return mid-2061.
Chondrites give geologists insights on the makeup of the early solar system. Geologists are driven by understanding how the Earth came to be what it is today. Chondrites formed at the time o
There are many theories that all the planets and other space rocks in the solar system orbit around the sun and follow the orbiting route due to the sun’s gravitational force keeping them in course. According to Sir Isaac Newton’s first law “An object at rest will remain at rest unless acted on by an unbalanced force. An object in motion continues in motion with the same speed and in the same direction unless acted upon by an unbalanced force.” This law is often called "the law of inertia". This is why these planets don’t go severely of course due to the consistent gravitational field the sun is providing. The Kuiper belt and the Asteroid belt are where most of the space rocks, also known as asteroids; orbit along and many stay together because they are part of the s...
The Kuiper Belt is an icy-bodied disc shapes area of the Solar System. Kuiper Belt has a circular shape, to be exact, it is a curved plane. It is over 4.5 to 7.4 billion kilometers from Sun. This is roughly 30 to 50 times the distance of Earth from Sun. The Kuiper Belt has been said to resemble the Asteroid Belt that lies between Mars and Jupiter. The difference between the Kuiper Belt and the Asteroid Belt is that the bodies are icier due to their distance from the Sun. The Kuiper Belt objects includes Pluto and other comets that orbit beyond Neptune. Most Kuiper Belt objects are made up of frozen volatiles such as methane, water and ammonia. In 1950 astronomer Gerald Kuiper predicted the existence of the Kuiper Belt and the find was named
A falling star is really a Meteor and is a form of space debris. They are not really stars at all. There are cases where meteors have entered the Earth’s atmosphere. In most cases, Meteors burn up upon entry into the atmosphere and never make it to the surface of the planet. There are times when the meteor starts to burn up, but because the mass is big enough, it makes it to the surface, smaller then when it started out. Through both means, the meteor deals with some measure of resistance upon entering the atmosphere. The main resistance that the meteor encounters is air resistance (or drag). Due to this collision with the atmosphere, the meteor’s surface begins to melt and vaporize causing the meteor to start breaking apart at its outer layers.
Europe. In 1577 he proved that the orbit of the comet of 1577 did lay beyond
Pluto's rotation period is 6.387 days, the same as its satellite Charon. Although it is common for a satellite to travel in a synchronous orbit with its planet, Pluto is the only planet to rotate synchronously with the orbit of its satellite. Thus being tidally locked, Pluto and Charon continuously face each other as they travel through space.
Solar nebula is a rotating flattened disk of gas and dust in which the outer part of the disk became planets while the center bulge part became the sun. Its inner part is hot, which is heated by a young sun and due to the impact of the gas falling on the disk during its collapse. However, the outer part is cold and far below the freezing point of water. In the solar nebula, the process of condensation occurs after enough cooling of solar nebula and results in the formation into a disk. Condensation is a process of cooling the gas and its molecules stick together to form liquid or solid particles. Therefore, condensation is the change from gas to liquid. In this process, the gas must cool below a critical temperature. Accretion is the process in which the tiny condensed particles from the nebula begin to stick together to form bigger pieces. Solar nebular theory explains the formation of the solar system. In the solar nebula, tiny grains stuck together and created bigger grains that grew into clumps, possibly held together by electrical forces similar to those that make lint stick to your clothes. Subsequent collisions, if not too violent, allowed these smaller particles to grow into objects ranging in size from millimeters to kilometers. These larger objects are called planetesimals. As planetesimals moved within the disk and collide with one another, planets formed. Because astronomers have no direct way to observe how the Solar System formed, they rely heavily on computer simulations to study that remote time. Computer simulations try to solve Newton’s laws of motion for the complex mix of dust and gas that we believe made up the solar nebula. Merging of the planetesimals increased their mass and thus their gravitational attraction. That, in turn, helped them grow even more massive by drawing planetesimals into clumps or rings around the sun. The process of planets building undergoes consumption of most of the planetesimals. Some survived planetesimals form small moons, asteroids, and comets. The leftover Rocky planetesimals that remained between Jupiter and Mars were stirred by Jupiter’s gravitational force. Therefore, these Rocky planetesimals are unable to assemble into a planet. These planetesimals are known as asteroids. Formation of solar system is explained by solar nebular theory. A rotating flat disk with center bulge is the solar nebula. The outer part of the disk becomes planets and the center bulge becomes the sun.
The universe is a shooting gallery and earth is the bullseye. The earth is always under threat of a doomesday asteroid that will wipe out civilization. There are over one thousand asteroids traveling toward earth and only three quarters are accounted for. Where are the other one forth? No one knows because the government doesn't fund NASA astrologists enough to cover the astroids. Just one impact could end civilization as we know it. No matter where it hits everything would die, even bacteria. To give an estimate how much is spent on asteroid detection. It is said to be less than the cost to operate a single McDonald's franchise. Total disaster would occur no matter where the asteroid hit. Land, sea it doesn't matter. Ocean impact would create a number of things. First, a Tsunami(tidal wave) would be created on impact. The wave would be hundreds for feet high traveling hundreds of miles per hour. It would start to slow down crashing ashore through all coastal city. Then, finally wash up hundreds for miles inland. " The mid-Atlantic Ocean impact ranging from 400 meters to 5 kilometers in diameter. This would generate a tsunami that would sweep across the upper East Coast of the United States to the Appalachian Mountains."(Gottschalk 1) The blast of the impact would equal a 300 gigaton blast of T.N.T. Also, 2.4 seconds after impact, a small fireball with a temperature of 5000'C would sweep across long island. A land fall strike would cause total divistation. The asteroid would create a earth trembling impact causing earth quakes around the world. The binding flash will show impact and the crater would be twenty miles across. Then, a blanket of dust and debris would blanket the earth and block the sun's light. This would occur for hundreds of years and the climate would be disrupted. Global killer no matter where it hits. The end of the world is only 28 years, 10 months, 19 days, 1 hour, 45 minutes, and 39 seconds away. An asteroid named XF11 is on route to hit earth directly. October is the month and 2038 is the year. Discovered by Jim Scotti on December 6, 1997 while looking at star with the Arizona Spacewatch Group. The asteroid "is predicted to pass at a rather comfortable distance of about 600,000 miles (about 960,000 kilometers) in 2028," "reported Dr. Donald K.
Most big asteroids are ball shaped. Smaller asteroids, which are usually broken off of a larger asteroid, come in a lot of different shapes. All asteroids have craters that form when they bump or crash into other asteroids. The older the asteroid, the more times it has been hit and the more craters it has.
The tail, which is made of a narrow column of dust and gas, is the largest part of the comet and can extend up to 100 million kilometers across the inner solar system. It is only visible when the comet is within 3 AU's of the Sun. The coma is a cloud of gas that can have a diameter of 100,000 kilometers, and it is created by the heat of the Sun boiling the core or nucleus of the comet. The nucleus is often referred to as a giant "iceberg" or "dirty snowball" and is a block of ice with an irregular mass and a diameter of about 10 kilometers. The Oort cloud, which is an assemblage of trillions of icy bodies, is a spherical shell that completely surrounds the Solar System and is believed to be the origin of long-period comets that now orbit the Sun.
The last of the features of the comet are the tails. Most comets have two tails. One tail is made from dust particles and the other, called ion tail, is made gases. As a comet approaches the sun, the frozen gas becomes unfrozen which causes the dust particles to become free. Light pressure from the sun and some other forces cause these materials to move away from the head of the comet and in the opposite direction from the sun. According to Charles A. Schweighauser in his book, entitled Astronomy from A to Z: A Dictionary of Celestial Objects and Ideas, he states that we see comet heads and tails because they not only reflect sunlight, but they also fluoresce—give off their own light—when comets are near the sun. The tails from the comet may be up to 150 million kilometers long each or together.
Most meteorites are leftover debris from the formation of the planets. They originate in the main asteroid belt. But a few specimens were blasted off the Moon or Mars in giant impacts.
According to Nancy Atkinson from Universe Today, “Asteroids and comets have a few things in common. They are both celestial bodies orbiting our Sun, and they both can have unusual orbits, sometimes straying close to Earth or the other planets.” Moreover, they are both “leftovers” made from materials from the formation of our
According to an article done by the Tulane University, the Earth passes through a periodic time of meteor showers in which it enters a belt of high concentration cosmic dust and other particles. It is during this time when many meteors are observed. In fact, just in the year of 2003 alone the US sustained two meteor showers, one crashing through a 2 story house in uptown New Orleans while another shower of meteorites destroyed several houses and injured 20