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Comet
What is a comet made of?
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1 Reply
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Comets are icy celestial bodies composed of a mixture of dust, rock, water ice, frozen gases, and other organic compounds. When a comet approaches the Sun, the heat causes some of the ice and gases within the comet to vaporize, creating a glowing coma (the fuzzy envelope around the comet’s nucleus) and often a tail that points away from the Sun due to solar wind and radiation pressure.
The nucleus of a comet is a solid, irregularly shaped object composed of rock, dust, and various ices such as water ice, carbon dioxide (dry ice), methane, ammonia, and more. As a comet gets closer to the Sun, these ices sublimate (change directly from solid to gas) and create the coma and tail that are characteristic of comets.
Comets are believed to be remnants from the early solar system and are considered to contain valuable information about the conditions present when the solar system was forming.
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