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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.
The tail of a comet points toward the direction of the Sun as it is moving through space based on the laws of refraction. The comet’s tail is composed of an air-like element that is transparent as it is seen in space but only when it is faced away from the Sun. The visibility of the tail is explained by solar rays reflecting off of the tail.
Halley's Comet is the only known short-period comet that is consistently visible to the ... Another point of origin for the Halley-type comets was proposed in ...
The approach of Comet Tsuchinshan–ATLAS has particularly excited astronomers because it is a long-period comet, meaning the comet takes more ... rock and ice from the solar system's origin ...
Advances were made in understanding sungrazing comets in the 19th century with the Great Comets of 1843, C/1880 C1, and 1882.C/1880 C1 and C/1843 D1 had very similar appearances and also resembled the Great Comet of 1106, therefore Daniel Kirkwood proposed that C/1880 C1 and C/1843 D1 were separate fragments of the same object. [1]
As the comet warms, parts of it sublimate; [1] this gives a comet a diffuse appearance when viewed through telescopes and distinguishes it from stars. The word coma comes from the Greek κόμη (kómē), which means "hair" and is the origin of the word comet itself. [2] [3] The coma is generally made of ice and comet dust. [1]
12P/Pons–Brooks is a periodic comet with an orbital period of 71 years. [9] Comets with an orbital period of 20–200 years are referred to as Halley-type comets.It is one of the brightest known periodic comets, reaching an absolute visual magnitude of about 5 in its approach to perihelion. [2]
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