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Comet is THE destination on free TV for true fans of sci-fi and fantasy. We relish everything out-of-this-world and the fans who love it, with some of the most iconic franchises including The X-Files, Stargate SG-1, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, and Grimm, plus fun movie titles that celebrate your sci-fi and fantasy fandom.
Comet. A comet is an icy, small Solar System body that warms and begins to release gases when passing close to the Sun, a process called outgassing. This produces an extended, gravitationally unbound atmosphere or coma surrounding the nucleus, and sometimes a tail of gas and dust gas blown out from the coma.
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NASA/JPL-Caltech/VTAD. Comets are cosmic snowballs of frozen gases, rock, and dust that orbit the Sun. When frozen, they are the size of a small town. When a comet's orbit brings it close to the Sun, it heats up and spews dust and gases into a giant glowing head larger than most planets. The dust and gases form a tail that stretches away from ...
- Where Do Comets Come from?
- What Brings Comets Near Earth So We Can See them?
- What Are The Parts of A Comet?
- Why Do Comets Have Tails?
- How Do We Learn About Comets?
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Comets are mostly found way out in the solar system. Some exist in a wide disk beyond the orbit of Neptune called the Kuiper Belt. We call these short-period comets. They take less than 200 years to orbit the Sun. Other comets live in the Oort Cloud, the sphere-shaped, outer edge of the solar system that is about 50 times farther away from the Sun ...
The gravity of a planet or star can pull comets from their homes in the Kuiper Belt or Oort Cloud. This tug can redirect a comet toward the Sun. The paths of these redirected comets look like long, stretched ovals. As the comet is pulled faster and faster toward the Sun, it swings around behind the Sun, then heads back toward where it came from. So...
At the heart of every comet is a solid, frozen core called the nucleus. This ball of dust and ice is usually less than 10 miles (16 kilometers) across – about the size of a small town. When comets are out in the Kuiper Belt or Oort Cloud, scientists believe that’s pretty much all there is to them – just frozen nuclei. But when a comet gets close to...
As dust and gases stream away from the nucleus, sunlight and particles coming from the Sun push them into a bright tail that stretches behind the comet for millions of miles. When astronomers look closely, they find that comets actually have two separate tails. One looks white and is made of dust. This dust tail traces a broad, gently curving path ...
People have been interested in comets for thousands of years. But it wasn't possible to get a good view of a comet nucleus from Earth since it is shrouded by the gas and dust of the coma. In recent years, though, several spacecraft have had the chance to study comets up close. NASA’s Stardust mission collected samples from Comet Wild 2 (prounounced...
Learn about comets, their origins, parts, tails and how we study them. Find out why comets are like frozen time capsules from the solar system formation and what they can tell us about life.
May 25, 2024 · Learn about comets, small bodies of ice and dust that form tails when they approach the Sun. Find out how comets are classified, named, and studied by astronomers.
Jul 31, 2023 · A comet nucleus is the solid core of a comet consisting of frozen molecules including water, carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, methane and ammonia as well as other inorganic and organic molecules ...
Jan 31, 2023 · A recently discovered green comet will soon zip by Earth for the first time in 50,000 years. It was last visible in the night sky during the Stone Age. Discovered on March 2, 2022, by astronomers ...
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