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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. These phenomena are due to the effects of ...
The nucleus of Comet Tempel 1. The nucleus is the solid, central part of a comet, formerly termed a dirty snowball or an icy dirtball. A cometary nucleus is composed of rock, dust, and frozen gases. When heated by the Sun, the gases sublime and produce an atmosphere surrounding the nucleus known as the coma.
While the solid nucleus of comets is generally less than 30 km across, the coma may be larger than the Sun, and ion tails have been observed to extend 3.8 astronomical units (570 Gm; 350 × 10 ^ 6 mi). [6] The Ulysses spacecraft made an unexpected pass through the tail of the comet C/2006 P1 (Comet McNaught), on February 3, 2007. [7]
The comet made its closest pass by the Sun in late September. The comet making its appearance now derived its name from those who first discovered it last year, the Tsuchinshan, or "Purple ...
Coma (comet) The coma is the nebulous envelope around the nucleus of a comet, formed when the comet passes near the Sun in its highly elliptical orbit. 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 ...
Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS has an 80,000 year orbit and, ... the comet made its closest approach to our sun and on Saturday, October 12 at 11:39 a.m. it will be just 43,911,824 miles from Earth (its ...
The Kuiper belt (/ ˈkaɪpər / KY-pər) [ 1 ] is a circumstellar disc in the outer Solar System, extending from the orbit of Neptune at 30 astronomical units (AU) to approximately 50 AU from the Sun. [ 2 ] It is similar to the asteroid belt, but is far larger—20 times as wide and 20–200 times as massive. [ 3 ][ 4 ] Like the asteroid belt ...
A group of the world's leading planet formation experts decided at a conference in 2006 [8] on the following definition of a planetesimal: A planetesimal is a solid object arising during the accumulation of orbiting bodies whose internal strength is dominated by self-gravity and whose orbital dynamics is not significantly affected by gas drag.