comets meteors and asteroids



by comet's a great way to travel
it is made of ice and gravel
its goes around in an elipse
we look foward to its trips
it never seems to start or stop
it has names like " halle-bopp"
it carries meteors in its train
they fall down like fiery rain
if one falls to earth alight
it is called a meteorite









sources and info

Comets

Comets are small rock, dust and ice objects that orbit the Sun. In 1950, Fred Whipple proposed the "dirty snowball" picture of comet structure. The nucleus of the comet - typically about 10 kilometers across - is composed mostly of dust and ices of carbon dioxide, water, ammonia and methane.

As the comet approaches the Sun, the ices in the nucleus sublime to form the coma, a dense cloud of gas and dust particles around the nucleus. The coma contains water, carbon dioxide and other neutral gases.

When comets are near the Sun, the pressure of the Sun's radiation on the coma blows the dust and gas in the coma back into a long tail or tails. Eventually, after the comet has made many orbits of the Sun, the coma will have been exhausted

http://www.astro.cornell.edu/academics/courses/astro2201/comet.htm


comet

Comet NEAT
Comet NEAT (C/2001Q4)
A small astronomical body, typically a few kilometers across, that orbits the Sun. Comets contain icy chunks and frozen gases with bits of embedded rock and dust, and possibly a rocky core, aptly described as a "dirty snowball."

Comets are leftovers from the formation of the Solar System and are believed to exist in vast numbers in the Oort Cloud and, to a lesser extent, in the Kuiper Belt. From these regions they can be perturbed by the gravitational influence of passing stars or interstellar clouds and thrown into new, highly elliptical orbits (see ellipse) that bring them into the inner Solar System.











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