STUDENT Nº:988287

1 Comets: the old ladies of the Solar System

2 A long, long, long time ago, the Sun had just lit up in the heart of a huge interstellar cloud of

3 gas and dust known as nebula the day that our Solar System was born four 4.5 billion of years

4 ago.

6 As a snowball that starts to grow when descending a slope, the dust that made up the nebula

7 got compacted little by little to form billions of small celestial bodies: the planetesimals.

9 These billions of small celestial bodies came together into a giant disk of dust and stones

10 revolving around the Sun: the protoplanetary disk. Similar disks have been found around

11 several stars such as Vega, in the constellation of Lyra, or Beta, in the constellation of Pictor.

12 Now imagine the dawn of our Solar System with all those collisions between all the billions of

13 planetesimals in all directions, in an endless bombing that lasted several hundred millions of

14 years!

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 STUDENT Nº:988287

2 The Moon, or even Mars and Mercury, have preserved, in the form of countless craters, the

3 traces of this fearsome bombing that have shaped our current Solar System for about a billion

4 of years.

5 As you may have guessed, the “snowball effect” increased with every collision until the biggest

6 planetesimals ended up absorbing the smallest ones, which gave rise to the planets of the Solar

7 System: Mercury, Venus, the Earth, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto.

8 On the other hand, it was not possible for the smallest planetesimals under approximately 124

9 miles of diameter to attract new dust for the formation of planets. Then, they were rejected to

10 the limits of our Solar System between 3,728 billion and 9,320 billion of miles away. If you

11 looked at the Sun from there, it would be nothing but an ordinary star in the sky.

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 STUDENT Nº:988287

1 Nowadays, billions of these small icy bodies make up the Kuiper belt and the Oort cloud far

2 beyond Pluto, in a midway between the Sun and the nearest star. Every now and then, one of

3 these little balls made of ice and rock detaches of his distant orbit and slams into the Sun to

4 give rise to a comet. When a comet appears in the sky, it is therefore a living fossil emerged

5 without alterations since the origin of our Solar System, 4.5 billion of years ago. The more the

6 comet gets closer to the Sun, the more it heats up, until its frozen core starts to lose gas leaving

7 a trail of one or more tails of electrified and phosphorescent gases.