Comet | Definition, Composition, & Facts | Britannica

Summary

comet, a small body orbiting the Sun with a substantial fraction of its composition made up of volatile ices. When a comet comes close to the Sun, the ices sublimate (go directly from the solid to the gas phase) and form, along with entrained dust particles, a bright outflowing atmosphere around the comet nucleus known as a coma. As dust and gas in the coma flow freely into space, the comet forms two tails, one composed of ionized molecules and radicals and one of dust. The word comet comes from the Greek (kometes), which means long-haired. Indeed, it is the appearance of the bright coma that is the standard observational test for whether a newly discovered object is a comet or an asteroid.

Comets are among the most-spectacular objects in the sky, with their bright glowing comae and their long dust tails and ion tails. Comets can appear at random from any direction and provide a fabulous and ever-changing display for many months as they move in highly eccentric orbits around the Sun.

Comets are important to scientists because they are primitive bodies left over from the formation of the solar system. They were among the first solid bodies to form in the solar nebula, the collapsing interstellar cloud of dust and gas out of which the Sun and planets formed. Comets formed in the outer regions of the solar nebula where it was cold enough for volatile ices to condense. This is generally taken to be beyond 5 astronomical units (AU; 748 million km, or 465 million miles), or beyond the orbit of Jupiter. Because comets have been stored in distant orbits beyond the planets, they have undergone few of the modifying processes that have melted or changed the larger bodies in the solar system. Thus, they retain a physical and chemical record of the primordial solar nebula and of the processes involved in the formation of planetary systems.

A comet is made up of four visible parts: the nucleus, the coma, the ion tail, and the dust tail. The nucleus is a solid body typically a few kilometres in diameter and made up of a mixture of volatile ices (predominantly water ice) and silicate and organic dust particles. The coma is the freely escaping atmosphere around the nucleus that forms when the comet comes close to the Sun and the volatile ices sublimate, carrying with them dust particles that are intimately mixed with the frozen ices in the nucleus. The dust tail forms from those dust particles and is blown back by solar radiation pressure to form a long curving tail that is typically white or yellow in colour. The ion tail forms from the volatile gases in the coma when they are ionized by ultraviolet photons from the Sun and blown away by the solar wind. Ion tails point almost exactly away from the Sun and glow bluish in colour because of the presence of CO+ ions.

Comets differ from other bodies in the solar system in that they are generally in orbits that are far more eccentric than those of the planets and most asteroids and far more inclined to the ecliptic (the plane of Earths orbit). Some comets appear to come from distances of over 50,000 AU, a substantial fraction of the distance to the nearest stars. Their orbital periods can be millions of years in length. Other comets have shorter periods and smaller orbits that carry them from the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn inward to the orbits of the terrestrial planets. Some comets even appear to come from interstellar space, passing around the Sun on open, hyperbolic orbits, but in fact are members of the solar system.

Comets are typically named for their discoverers, though some comets (e.g., Halley and Encke) are named for the scientists who first recognized that their orbits were periodic. The International Astronomical Union (IAU) prefers a maximum of two discoverers to be in a comets name. In some cases where a comet has been lost (its orbit was not determined well enough to predict its return), the comet is named for the original discoverer and also the observer(s) who found it again. A designation of C/ before a comets name denotes that it is a long-period comet (period greater than 200 years), while P/ denotes that the comet is periodic; i.e., it returns at regular, predictable intervals of fewer than 200 years. A designation of D/ denotes that the comet is deceased or destroyed, such as D/Shoemaker-Levy 9, the comet whose components struck Jupiter in July 1994. Numbers appearing before the name of a comet denote that it is periodic; the comets are numbered in the order that they are confirmed to be periodic. Comet 1P/Halley is the first comet to be recognized as periodic and is named after English astronomer Edmond Halley, who determined that it was periodic.

In 1995 the IAU implemented a new identification system for each appearance of a comet, whether it is periodic or long-period. The system uses the year of the comets discovery, the half-month in the year denoted by a letter A through Y (with I omitted to avoid confusion), and a number signifying the order in which the comet was found within that half-month. Thus, Halleys Comet is designated 1P/1682 Q1 when Halley saw it in August 1682, but 1P/1982 U1 when it was first spotted by astronomers before its predicted perihelion (point when closest to the Sun) passage in 1986. This identification system is similar to that now used for asteroid discoveries, though the asteroids are so designated only when they are first discovered. (The asteroids are later given official catalog numbers and names.) Formerly, a number after the name of a periodic comet denoted its order among comets discovered by that individual or group, but for new comets there would be no such distinguishing number.