Comet Facts

Comet Facts

1. Comets originate from a region of space outside the solar system called the Oort Cloud.

2. Comets are part of our solar system family. Like Grandma’s mystery meat pie, they are made of old leftovers after the Sun, the planets, and the moons were formed.

3. Gravitational effects will send a comet into the inner solar system where it may be captured by the Sun and become a periodic comet much like Haley’s Comet. If the comet has enough velocity it will round the Sun and never be seen again. 

4. Comets are icy bodies composed of frozen water, gases, and dust likened to a “dirty  snowball.” 

5. Comets such as Hale-Bopp warm up as they approach the Sun and dust and gas begins to stream off the comet’s nucleus generating two tails, a dust tail , and a gas tail. 

6. Some comets have orbited the Sun so many times that they have lost all or most of their ice and gas and are now “dead.” Dead comets may be much like some of the asteroids that are found between Mars and Jupiter. 

7. Some comets pass too close to the Sun (sungrazers) and are vaporized by the heat; while some comets may hit a planet such as Shoemaker-Levy 9 did in 1992 when it hit Jupiter. 

8. Scientists have discovered about 4,000 comets to date. However, they believe there could be hundreds of millions they have never observed in the Oort cloud.

9. The comet that causes the Leonids is called Tempel-Tuttle. It is named after two scientists who discovered it at the end of 1865.The scientists were not working together; one was in France and one was in America. They were each looking through telescopes. Both astronomers spotted the comet and reported their finding. The comet they found was not a big, bright comet. It is so small that it can only be seen with a telescope. The comet Tempel-Tuttle is about 2 1/2  miles in diameter.

10. When the Earth hits this stream of comet junk from Tempel-Tuttle, meteors seem to shoot out of the constellation Leo. That’s why this meteor shower is called the Leonids.

11. Comets only have tails when they are close to the sun. When they are far from the sun,  comets are extremely dark, cold, icy objects. The icy body is called the nucleus. Nuclei are made of various types of ices, dirt and dust. As comets get closer to the sun in their journeys through the solar system, they start to warm up. 

12. Comets come in a wide range of sizes. The largest nucleus observed is about 25 miles, or 40 kilometers, in diameter. The dust and ion tails can be enormous. Comet Hyakutake's ion tail stretched 360 million miles, or about 580 million kilometers.