Comets

The increased solar wind pushes off more and more vapor and dust from the nucleus of the comet, and the tail stretches out further into space - 200 million miles is not uncommon. But even at that, the amount of solids in a cometary tail of that length is estimated to be less than would fill a standard size suitcase. One astronomer observed that a comet's tail was "as close as you can get to absolutely nothing, and still have something".

Basically the evaporated gas of whatever the comet nucleus is made of. Often methane, ammonia, carbon mon- and di-oxide. A very good article is in the link below. However, due to relative motion and a few other forces, the tail is not all that straight.

It is called a Coma.

It is not just comets- all orbiting bodies speed up as they get closer to the object they are orbiting, as stated by Kepler's Second Law, because the gravity between the two objects gets stronger as they get closer together, as stated by Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation.

The nucleus of a comet is mostly solid, while the coma and tail of the comet is composed of gasses and (we believe) a lot of dust. As the comet approaches the Sun, sunlight heats the nucleus of the comet and melts some of the frozen gasses, which sublimate into space carrying dust into space, forming the coma and the tail of the comet.

Short period comets are thought to originate in the Kuiper Belt, outside the orbit of Neptune.
Long period comets originate in the Oort Cloud, which is far more distant, about half way to the nearest star!
Comets, as with any astronomical body, can have its orbit perturbed (changed) by external gravitational forces. Long period comets can become short period and vice versa. The orbits can range from a few tens of years to many thousands, some can even escape altogether.

Comets are named after the people who have discovered it or by the shape or after break away from a parent comet.

eg:

Halley's comet

Tempel-Tuffle comet

Biela's comet

Encke's comet

Ikeya Seki comet

kooutek comet

comet west

comet Bowell

comet IRAS -Araki-Alcock

Comet Austin.

Comets are small bodies of rock and ice which are in highly eccentric orbits around the Sun. They spend most of their time far from the Sun, some beyond the outer planets. When a comet's orbit eventually comes close to the Sun, the surface is heated and partly vaporized. This ejects the gas molecules that give the comet its tails.

Comets are thought to be objects from the Kuiper belt beyond Neptune, or from even farther out. The Oort Cloud is a region many billions of miles past Pluto, where it is theorized that millions of widely scattered icy objects exist. Gravitational disturbances can eventually pull them inward into cometary paths. If they achieve a regular orbit, they can become comets seen again and again.

stupid old comet encke doesn't have any eccentricity at all!

Solar wind contains intense clouds of high energy particles which are produced by solar stroms. These clouds of particles affect Earth. These clouds are called coronal mass ejections. They reach the earth in three to four days.

The coronal mass ejections cause changes in the magnetic field of the earth when they collide with the field. They cause more changes to the magnetic field at times even at lower altitudes close to the ground when they leak through the field especially near the north ans south Poles. These changes can produce many problems with electrical equipment.

Not much light has been thrown on the way in which solar wind" plasma" invades the Earth's magnetic field and seeps into the inner regions where the Van Allen radiation belts are located. Also, in the direction opposite the Sun, the Earth's magnetic field is pulled way out into interplanetary space making it look like a comet. Many different electrical disturbances take place in this "geotail" region. These can accelerate partiles to high speeds and energies. All of this is made much more violent by the solar wind, especially the strom clouds that the Sun launches our way very often.

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The largest body in the asteroid belt is Ceres, with a diameter of about 950 km. Although it has long been considered to be an asteroid, Ceres was classified as a "dwarf planet" on August 24, 2006. (The other dwarf planets are Pluto, Makemake, Haumea, and Eris.) The issue of whether Ceres remains an asteroid was not addressed at that time.

By observing the comet in different times and positions, and figuring out a "best fit" of the orbit.

Gravitational interactions between passing objects always has the potential to disturb the orbits of the two bodies involved, but I'm unaware of any research indicating that objects have been observed to have been perturbed OUTWARD from the Kuiper Belt to the far more distant (and hypothetical) Oort Cloud. It has probably happened, at least a FEW times. But the Kuiper Belt itself is so distant that our ability to detect comet-sized objects is quite limited. And aside from the philosophical argument of "Where do new comets come from, if not from the Oort cloud?", we have precisely ZERO actual evidence that the Oort Cloud exists as postulated.

There have been intermittent speculations that a massive but dark object, perhaps a planet or a brown dwarf star, might be in a highly elliptical orbit around the Sun. This object, occasionally named "Nemesis", might perturb distant Oort Cloud and Kuiper Belt objects out of their lazy orbits and drop them into the inner solar system as comets. The idea is that this might explain some strange periodicity of mass extinctions on Earth, that we might expect at any century a withering cosmic hailstorm of deadly proportion.

But the proposed math and timetables never seems to work out, and a massive enough object should have been discovered by now.

True. We think; the Oort Cloud is a hypothesis, because so far we are unable to detect small dark objects so far from the Earth. We have never actually detected anything in the Oort Cloud. But long-period comets come from SOMEWHERE, and Jan Oort's idea of a "cloud" of primitive objects makes sense.

it depends where it is, how fast its going, whre its coming from...... ect.....

The superstitious belief surrounding comets stems from historical misconceptions and fear of the unknown. Before the scientific understanding of comets, they were often seen as omens or harbingers of doom due to their unpredictable appearance in the sky. However, today we know that comets are simply icy bodies that orbit the Sun, and their appearance is a natural occurrence with no supernatural significance.

The comet was named after the man not the other way around. No man as far as I am aware has been named after a comet with the possible exception of Bill Halley and the comets?

astroid

the mom: Gracey Halley the dad was also Edmond halley. the mom: Gracey Halley the dad was also Edmond halley.

The Comet Strikes was created in 1971.

ISON will be visible late 2013 and early 2014.

Sometimes when you look up at the sky you'll see a meteor, by chance. You can't know in advance when you'll see one, and they only last a fraction of a second or a few seconds at most - but at some times of the year there are more than at others (the so-called meteor showers).

A comets orbit is considered a cycle because a comet circles back in an elliptical orbit.

The USSR, Russia, USA, the EU, Britain and Japan. the last two did not succeed with their missions.

In 1740 a comet in Ireland was about to hit the earth, and everyone panicked but a local girl named Eva. The story says Eva was a mermaid and became a mermaid in a sea cave. She used her mermaid powers to build a tower of light which drove the comet away. Everyone was so thankful to Eva that they named the comet after her as a thanks. After that Eva disappeared, there are a lot of different stories on what happened to her. The comet Eva really does exist.

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