What is comet shape?

What is comet shape?

Planets are usually more or less spherical in shape, usually bulging slightly at the equator. Comets are irregular in shape, with their longest dimension often twice the shortest.

Why is a comet orbit elliptical?

Comets are thought to orbit the sun in either the Oort cloud or Kuiper belt. When another star passes by the solar system, its gravity pushes the Oort cloud and/or Kuiper belt and causes comets to descend toward the sun in a highly elliptical orbit with the sun at one focus of the ellipse.

What is the orbit shape of an asteroid?

Most asteroids are irregularly shaped, though a few are nearly spherical, and they are often pitted or cratered. As they revolve around the Sun in elliptical orbits, the asteroids also rotate, sometimes quite erratically, tumbling as they go.

What are comets popularly described as?

Cometary nuclei are composed of an amalgamation of rock, dust, water ice, and frozen carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, methane, and ammonia. As such, they are popularly described as “dirty snowballs” after Fred Whipple’s model. Comets with a higher dust content have been called “icy dirtballs”.

Is comet eccentric orbit?

Comets usually have highly eccentric elliptical orbits, and they have a wide range of orbital periods, ranging from several years to potentially several millions of years. Short-period comets originate in the Kuiper belt or its associated scattered disc, which lie beyond the orbit of Neptune.

What is a comet size?

As a rule of thumb, comets are about 10 km in diameter. Halley is about 16 x 8 x 8 km; Hale-Bopp was one of the biggest comets every seen, with a diameter twice that of Halley. But the typical comet is about 10 km in size, but of course is odd shaped since such small objects will not be spherical shaped.

What are some features of a comet?

A comet has four components: a nucleus, a coma, a dust tail and an ion tail. The nucleus of a comet contains the vast majority of its total mass. Comets have a halo when they move close to the Sun.

What is the size and shape of comets?

Do comets rotate or revolve?

Rotation. Asteroids and comets rotate, but not exactly like the Earth. Because Earth is a sphere, its mass is distributed relatively evenly, so it rotates smoothly. Asteroids and comets aren’t uniformly shaped, so their rotation can be more of a tumble.

What kind of orbit does a comet have?

Comets go around the Sun in a highly elliptical orbit. They can spend hundreds and thousands of years out in the depths of the solar system before they return to Sun at their perihelion.

How long is the tail of a comet?

Comet tails can be as long as the distance between the Earth and the Sun. The image to the right shows the motion of a comet around the Sun. The red circle represents the orbit of one of terrestrial planets. As can be seen, the path of the comet is much more elliptical.

Why are some comets shaped like bowling pins?

Since they are relatively small – between 100 meters to 40 kilometers across – they have relatively little mass. This means that they don’t have enough gravity to pack all that stuff into a neat round ball. So, they take on a variety of shapes including the bowling pin shape of comet Hartley 2.

What makes the shape of comet Hartley 2?

As you can see, comet Hartley 2 is not spherical at all. In fact, it is a pretty bizarre shape! So I started doing a little research. Turns out, comets are made of rock, frozen gases (CO2, methane, ammonia), water ice, and dust.