Comets and Asteroids
Comets
Comets
- Comets are cosmic snowballs of frozen gases, rock and dust roughly the size of a small town.
- Comets formed some 4.6 billion years ago , & they were formed in our solar system.
- They formed from remains of small lumps of frozen gas and dust in the outer region of the solar system
- Comets orbit the sun, but most are believed to inhabit in an area known as the Oort Cloud, far beyond the orbit of Pluto. Sometimes comets streak through the inner solar system while some do so regularly some only once ever century. Unlike comets planetary orbits are different.
- As comets approach the sun they heat up. The ice then turns into vapors. After solar winds sweep the vapor & dust into a long tail.
- The video below is a great video on comets. It talks about what they are and many other things. If you
Asteroids
- Asteroids are small rocky worlds that orbit or revolve around the sun. They are the larger rocks in space.
- A meteor is the flash of light we see when interplanetary debris burns up in our atmosphere. The debris itself is called a meteoroid.
- Near earth asteroids are asteroids that are nudged by the gravitational attraction of nearby planets which causes them to come in Earths neighborhood or special environment.
- 65 million years ago - A 10 kilometer asteroid striked north of the Yucatan Peninsula which causesd a global firestorm then a cold snap and finally a global warming that extinguishes the dinosaurs.
- This photo is a photo of Ida taken by Galileo umanned spacecraft on August 28, 1993
Article Intro
NASA - National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
Citation Page
"Full Text of "Johnson's Natural Philosophy and Key to Philosophical Charts : Illustrated with 500 Cuts; Being Reduced Photographic Copies of All the Diagrams Contained in the Author's Philosophical Series of Indestructible School Charts ; for the Use of Schools and Families"" Full Text of "Johnson's Natural Philosophy and Key to Philosophical Charts : Illustrated with 500 Cuts; Being Reduced Photographic Copies of All the Diagrams Contained in the Author's Philosophical Series of Indestructible School Charts ; for the Use of Schools and Families" N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Dec. 2014. <http://archive.org/stream/johnsonsnaturalp00john/johnsonsnaturalp00john_djvu.txt>.
"History of Asteroid Impacts." History of Asteroid Impacts. N.p., n.d. Web. 08 Dec. 2014. <http://whyfiles.org/106asteroid/2.html>.
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