Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
The coma is generally made of water and dust, with water making up to 90% of the volatiles that outflow from the nucleus when the comet is within 3 to 4 astronomical units (450,000,000 to 600,000,000 km; 280,000,000 to 370,000,000 mi) of the Sun. [50] The H 2 O parent molecule is destroyed primarily through photodissociation and to a much ...
It was once thought that water-ice was the predominant constituent of the nucleus. [60] In the dirty snowball model, dust is ejected when the ice retreats. [61] Based on this, about 80% of the Halley's Comet nucleus would be water-ice, and frozen carbon monoxide makes up another 15%.
The coma is generally made of ice and comet dust. [1] Water composes up to 90% of the volatiles that outflow from the nucleus when the comet is within 3–4 au (280–370 million mi; 450–600 million km) from the Sun. [1] The H 2 O parent molecule is destroyed primarily through photodissociation and to a much smaller extent photoionization. [1]
Near-Earth comets (NECs) are objects in a near-Earth orbit with a tail or coma made up of dust, gas or ionized particles emitted by a solid nucleus. Comet nuclei are typically less dense than asteroids but they pass Earth at higher relative speeds, thus the impact energy of a comet nucleus is slightly larger than that of a similar-sized ...
The comet’s next appearance may be in 80,000 years. ... Scientists were unsure if the comet — composed of ice, frozen gases and rocks — would survive its trip around our solar system’s ...
The particles from asteroids, which are made up of rock and metal, sometimes make it to the ground, where they are known as meteorites, Lunsford said. But a comet composed of ice, frozen gases and ...
The vaporized ices later resolidified and assembled into comets. So the comets in this model would have a different composition than those comets that were made directly from interstellar ice. The 3) primordial rubble pile model for comet formation says that comets agglomerate in the region where Jupiter was forming.
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]