COMETS Comets are balls of rock and ice that grow tails as they approach the sun in the

course of their highly elliptical orbits. As comets heat up, gas and dust are expelled and trail behind them. The sun illuminates this trail, causing it to glow. The glowing trails are visible in the night sky. While there are perhaps trillions of comets ringing the outer fringes of the solar system, bright comets appear in Earth's visible night sky about once per decade. Short-period comets such as Halley's were perturbed from the so-called Kuiper belt out beyond the orbit of Neptune and pass through the inner solar system once or twice in a human lifetime. Longperiod comets come from the Oort Cloud, which rings the outer reaches of the solar system, and pass near the sun once every hundreds or thousands of years. Occasional collisions and gravitational tugs send asteroids and comets careering toward the sun on highly elliptical orbits, some close enough to Earth to pose a risk of impact. Astronomers are constantly on the lookout for bodies on such a catastrophic trajectory. Most asteroids, fortunately, are too small

to cause any damage. Instead they burn up in the atmosphere and appear to us as a shooting star.