Do you know what a comet is? Find out everything about them

For hundreds of years people have been interested in comets but it was not always possible to study them closely, since their core It is difficult to see because it is surrounded by a cloud of dust. However, in recent years, spacecraft have managed to get closer and better understand as and what they are formed .

NASA (United States Space Agency) has recognized almost 4,000 comets to date, identifying them as large objects that orbit planets and the Sun itself. Understand more about these bodies:

What are comets?

They are large bodies made of dust, rocks and ice formed by the leftovers from the formation of the Solar System, 4.6 billion years ago, and are found in the outer orbits of planets. An example is Neptune which has comets in two regions: in Kuiper Belt and on Oort Cloud .

In the first, bodies are found that have an orbit classified as short since they take less than 200 years to go around the Sun. In the second, they are those in orbit long which can take up to 250 thousand years to travel the path.

The gravity of some planets or stars can “pull” these comets towards out of its orbit normal and take them towards the Sun, in a movement that draws an ellipse around the great star. The moment this happens, its format and composition change and it is possible to view them.

What is its format?

A comet is made up of four parts: the core The with the and the two tails .

O core it is made of ice, dust and rocks and measures up to 16 kilometers. When the object is far from the Sun, it is composed only of this part, which is frozen. As it gets closer to the Sun, the ice in its composition goes through the sublimation process — going from solid to gaseous — and forms the with the around the center.

One of tails is that of ions, which are formed from gases ionized by ultraviolet photons blown by the solar wind. This one has a bluish tone and always points in the opposite direction to the Sun. The other tail It is made of dust and ice, and is white in color.

When the icy surface of a comet evaporates as it approaches the Sun, many particles of dust and rocks are released — the meteors . This debris is scattered along its path, especially in the interior of the Solar System.

What is a meteor shower?

Several times a year, as the Earth makes its journey around the Sun, its orbit crosses that of a comet, which means the Earth crashes into a bunch of comet debris .

According to NASA, the meteor shower is the phenomenon in which many of these bodies enter our atmosphere. The agency explains that as the space rock falls towards Earth, the air resistance over the rock makes it extremely hot, forming tails and giving the impression of seeing a “shooting star”.