Skip to main content
Like
Create new Glog
previous
next
Email share
20 views | 0 likes | 0 reposts
Comets, Meteors, Asteroids & Meteorites
Comets are bright objects with long tails, which we sometimes see streaking across the night sky.A comet is actually just a giant ball of dirty ice. A comets orbit the sun but they have a very long orbit and they spend most of the orbit very far away from the sun. We only see them when their orbit brings them close to the sun for a few weeks. A comets tail is made as it nears the sun and begins to melt. A big plume of gas millions of kilometers log is blown out behind by solar wind.The tail is what you see, shining as the sunlight catches it. The closer a comet gets to the sun, the faster it travels.
Meteors are space objects that crash into the Earths atmosphere. Meteors are made up of iron, rock and nickel. They may be stray asteroids or broken fragments of a comet. Most meteors could be no bigger than a pea. Sometimes they are made out of just rock or just nickel. Meteors are from outer space. They are sucked in by the gravity of earth and break our atmostphere, falling to the ground. Meteors are sometimes called shooting stars as they burn up as they hit Earth's atmosphere .t The burn up is caused by the friction of the rock rubbing against the atmosphere causes heat and light.. The moon has many craters from meteors.
An asteroid is a big rock in space. Some can be very lage but others can be as small as a grain of sand. Asterioids orbit the sun like the planets, but are too small to be called planets although they are sometimes called minor planets. Most asteroids (more than half a million) are found in the Asteroid belt which is a ring, which lies in the orbit between Mars and Jupiter. Some distant asteroids are made from ice and they orbit the sun beyond Neptune.
Meteorites are larger Meteors that penetrate right through the Earth's atmosphere and reach the ground. A large Meteorite could cause a crater on Earth. It is suspected that a larger Meteorite my have chilled the earth and wiped out the dinosaurs.
