Comets are celestial bodies made up of dust, rock and ice and revolve around the Sun. A comet is also called a tail star. This celestial body is a remnant of the formation of the Solar System about 4.6 billion years ago.
Linguistically, comets come from the Greek menace. comet Which means long hair. The term is used to describe the shape of a celestial body with a tail or hair behind it.
Why do comets have tails?
Comets have tails because comets move closer and closer to the Sun due to the Sun’s gravitational force. Comets made of ice will heat up as the temperature of the comet rises. The rise in temperature triggers the melting of ice and forms gas.
The gas combined with the dust will form a tail behind the comet. That’s why comets are also called tail stars.
What is the size of a comet?
The size of comets varies greatly, there are even comets that are as big as planets. However, this size will get smaller as the comet gets closer to the Sun. However, comet tails can be up to a million kilometers long.
types of comets
On the basis of their orbital position, comets are divided into two parts, namely short-period comets and long-period comets.
Short-period comets are comets that orbit in the Kuiper Belt, an asteroid belt that lies beyond the orbit of the planet Neptune. This comet is called short period because it takes less than 200 years to orbit the Sun only once.
Long-period comets are comets that orbit in the Oort cloud. The Oort cloud is 50 times farther from the Sun than the Kuiper Belt. The long period represents the time it takes to orbit the Sun once, which is over 250,000 years.
