•MOL

Comets, Asteroids, & Meteors

OBJECTIVES
•Identify the difference between
comets, meteors, and asteroids.
•Compare and contrast comets,
meteors, and asteroids.
COMETS
•Comets are frozen leftovers from the
formation of the solar system composed of
dust, rock and ices.
•They have been referred to as "dirty
snowballs."
•They range from a few miles to tens of miles
wide, but as they orbit closer to the sun, they
heat up and spew gases and dust into a
glowing head that can be larger than a planet.
•This material forms a tail that
stretches away from the Sun for
millions of miles.
•There are likely billions of comets
orbiting our Sun in the Kuiper Belt
and even more distant Oort Cloud.
•Where Do Comets Come From?
KUIPER BELT AND OORT CLOUD
• This disc-like belt of icy bodies in the outer
Solar System, extending from the orbit of
Neptune (at 30 AU) to approximately 50
AU from the Sun is known as the Kuiper
belt.
• 1 AU = 150 million km.

• Taking less than 200 years to orbit the sun.

•As theorized by astronomer Gerard Kuiper
in 1951, a disc-like belt of icy bodies exists
beyond Neptune, where a population of
dark comets orbits the Sun in the realm of
Pluto.
•These icy objects, occasionally pushed by
gravity into orbits bringing them closer to
the Sun, become the so-called short-period
comets.
•Less predictable are long-period
comets, many of which arrive from
a region called the Oort Cloud
about 100,000 astronomical units.
•Oort Cloud comets can take as long
as 30 million years to complete one
trip around the Sun.
• Each comet has a tiny frozen part,
called a nucleus, often no larger than a
few kilometers across
• The nucleus contains icy chunks, frozen
gases with bits of embedded dust.
• A comet warms up as it nears the Sun
and develops an atmosphere, or coma.
•The coma may extend hundreds of
thousands of kilometers.
•The pressure of sunlight and high-
speed solar particles (solar wind) can
blow the coma dust and gas away from
the Sun, sometimes forming a long,
bright tail. Comets actually have two
tails―a dust tail and an ion (gas) tail.
•3,697 known COMETS
•The Halley’s comet is considered a periodic
comet and returns to the Earth’s vicinity about
once every 75 – 100 years.
•As remnants of the early planetary evolution,
comets may yield important clues about the
formation of our solar system.
•Comets may have brought water and organic
compounds, the building blocks of life, to the
early Earth and other parts of the solar system.
Asteroids
Asteroids,
•Sometimes called minor planets, are rocky
remnants left over from the early formation of
our solar system about 4.6 billion years ago.
•The current known asteroid count is: 1,039,283.
•Most of this can be found orbiting the sun
between Mars and Jupiter within the main
asteroid belt.
Asteroid The total mass of all
•Sized from Vesta the the asteroids
largest at about 329 combined is less than
miles (530 kilometers) that of Earth's Moon
in diameter - to
bodies that are less
than 33 feet (10
meters) across.
Asteroid
• irregularly shaped, though a few are
nearly spherical, and they are often
pitted or cratered. As they revolve
around the sun in elliptical orbits,
• More than 150 asteroids are known to
have a small companion moon (some
have two moons).
• There are also binary (double)
asteroids, in which two rocky bodies of
roughly equal size orbit each other, as
well as triple asteroid systems.
 COMPOSITION OF ASTEROID

C-type (chondrite)
• 1.

asteroids
are most common, probably consist of
clay and silicate rocks, and are dark in
appearance. They are among the most
ancient objects in the solar system.
•2. S-types ("stony") are
made up of silicate
materials and nickel-iron.
• 3.
M-types are metallic
(nickel-iron).
Why is it that there are differences in asteroid
composition?
• The asteroids' compositional differences
are related to how far from the sun they
formed. Some experienced high
temperatures after they formed and partly
melted, with iron sinking to the center and
forcing basaltic (volcanic) lava to the
surface.
 Bright Idea!!!
•Jupiter's massive gravity and occasional
close encounters with Mars or another
object change the asteroids' orbits,
knocking them out of the main belt and
hurling them into space in all directions
across the orbits of the other planets.
Meteors & Meteorites
Meteors, Meteoroid &
Meteorites
•They’re all related to the
flashes of light called
“shooting stars” sometimes
seen streaking across the sky.
•Meteoroids are what we call “space rocks”
that range in size from dust grains to small
asteroids.
•Most are pieces of other, larger bodies that
have been broken or blasted off
•Some come from comets, others from
asteroids, and some even come from the
Moon and other planets.
•When meteoroids enter Earth’s
atmosphere, or that of another planet,
like Mars, at high speed and burn up,
they’re called meteors.
•This is also when we refer to them as
“shooting stars”. Sometimes meteors
can even appear brighter than Venus --
that’s when we call them “fireballs”.
•Scientists estimate that about 48.5
tons (44,000 kilograms) of
meteoritic material falls on Earth
each day.
•When a meteoroid survives its trip
through the atmosphere and hits
the ground, it’s called a meteorite.
•A very large asteroid impact 65 million
years ago is thought to have
contributed to the extinction of about
75 percent of marine and land animals
on Earth at the time, including the
dinosaurs. It created the 180-mile-
wide (300-kilometer wide) Chicxulub
Crater on the Yucatan Peninsula.