A comet is a relatively small astronomical object similar to an asteroid but composed largely of ice. In Earth's solar system, the orbits of comets may extend past that of Pluto; of the comets which enter the inner solar system, most have relatively highly elliptical orbits. Often described as "dirty snowballs", comets are composed largely of frozen carbon dioxide, methane and water with dust and various mineral aggregates mixed in.

Comets are thought of as debris left over from the condensation of a solar nebula; it is generally argued that the outer edges of such nebulae are cool enough that water exists in a solid (rather than gaseous) state. It would be wrong to describe comets as asteroids surrounded by ice; the outer edges of a nebula's accretion disc are sufficiently cold that forming bodies do not undergo the planetary differentiation experienced by objects within the planetary orbits.

Contents

1 Physical characteristics 2 History of comet study 2.1 Studies of orbits 2.2 Studies of physical characteristics 3 See also 4 External links

Physical characteristics

Comets are sometimes perturbed from their distant orbits, falling into extremely elliptical orbits that bring them very close to the Sun. When a comet approaches the inner solar system, the warmth from the sun causes its outer layers of ice to evaporate. The streams of dust and gas this releases form a huge tenuous atmosphere around the comet called the coma, and the force exerted on the coma by the sun's radiation pressure and solar wind cause an enormous tail to form pointing directly away from the sun. Often the dust and gas each form their own distinct tail, pointed in slightly different directions due to the dust being left behind in the comet's orbit (so it may often be a curved tail) and the ion tail (gas) always points directly away from the sun since gas is more strongly affected by the solar wind than dust is. The solid body of the comet itself is referred to as the nucleus.

Both coma and tail are spectacularly illuminated by the Sun and are sometimes visible from the Earth when a comet passes through the inner solar system, the dust reflecting sunlight directly and the gases glowing due to ionization. Most comets are too faint to be visible without the aid of a telescope. A few each decade become bright enough to be visible with the naked eye. Before the invention of the telescope, comets seemed to appear out of nowhere in the sky and gradually vanish out of sight. They were usually considered bad omens of deaths of kings or noble men, or coming catastrophes. From ancient sources, such as Chinese oracle bones, it is known that their appearance have been noticed by humans for millennia.

Comets are classified according to their orbital periods. Short period comets have orbits of less than 200 years. Long period comets have longer orbits but remain gravitationally bound to the Sun. Single-apparition comets have parabolic and hyperbolic orbits which will cause them to permanently exit the solar system after one pass by the Sun. On the other extreme, the short period comet Encke has an orbit which never places it farther from the Sun than Jupiter. Short-period comets are thought to originate in the Kuiper belt, whereas the source of long-period comets is thought to be the Oort cloud. A variety of mechanisms have been proposed to explain why comets get perturbed into highly elliptical orbits, including close approaches to other stars as the Sun follows its orbit through the Milky Way Galaxy; and the Sun's hypothetical companion star Nemesis, an unknown Planet X.

Ironically, cometary nuclei are among the blackest objects known to exist in the solar system. The Giotto probe found that Comet Halley's nucleus reflects approximately 4% of the light that falls on it, and Deep Space 1 discovered that Comet Borrelly's surface reflects only 2.4% to 3% of the light that falls on it; by comparison, asphalt reflects 7% of the light that falls on it. It is thought that complex organic compounds are the dark surface material. Solar heating drives off volatile compounds leaving behind heavy long-chain organics that tend to be very dark, like tar or crude oil. The very darkness of cometary surfaces allows them to absorb the heat necessary to drive their spectacularly bright outgassing.

In 1996, comets were found to emit X-rays [1]. These X-rays surprised researchers, because X-rays are typically emitted by hot objects and comets are cold. The X-rays were generated by the interaction between comets and the solar wind: when highly charged ions fly through a cometary atmosphere, they collide with cometary atoms and molecules. In these collisions, the ions will capture one or more electrons leading to emission of X-rays and far ultraviolet photons[2].

Of the thousands of known comets, some are very unusual. Comet Encke orbits from inside the orbit of Jupiter to inside the orbit of Mercury while Comet 29P/Schwassmann-Wachmann orbits in an unstable orbit entirely between Jupiter and Saturn. 2060 Chiron whose unstable orbit keeps it between Saturn and Uranus was originally classified as an asteroid until a faint coma was noticed. Similarly, Comet Shoemaker-Levy 2 was originally called asteroid 1990 UL3. Some Near-earth asteroids are thought to be extinct nuclei of comets which no longer experience outgassing. Some comets have been observed to break up (Comet Biela was one example) while one has been observed to have collided with another object (Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 which hit Jupiter in 1994). Some comets, such as the Sun-grazing comets, orbit in groups and are thought to be pieces of a single object that has broken apart.

Because of non-gravitational forces and also the gravitation influence of a massive planet like Jupiter, it is easy for a periodic comet's orbit to be perturbed. For this reason, a number of periodic comets discovered in earlier decades or a previous century are now lost, since their orbits were never known well enough to know where to look for their future appearances. However, occasionally a "new" comet will be discovered and upon calculation of its orbit it turns out to be an old "lost" comet. An example is Comet 11P/Tempel-Swift-LINEAR , which was discovered in 1869 but became unobservable after 1908 due to perturbations by Jupiter, and was not found again until accidentally rediscovered by LINEAR in 2001.

History of comet study

Studies of orbits

Historically, comets were thought to be unlucky, or even interpreted as attacks by heavenly beings against terrestrial inhabitants. Some authorities interpret references to "falling stars" in Gilgamesh, Revelation and the Book of Enoch as references to comets, or possibly bolides.

It was not settled whether comets are atmospheric phenomena or interplanetary objects until the 16th century, when measurements of parallax taken by Tycho Brahe revealed that they must be moving outside of the Earth's atmosphere. In the 17th century, Edmond Halley used the theory of gravitation, recently developed by Isaac Newton, to try to calculate the orbits of comets. He then found that one of them periodically returned to the vicinity of the sun every 76-77th year. Soon this comet became known as Comet Halley, and from ancient sources it is known to have been observed by humans since at least 66 BC.

The second comet to be discovered to have a periodic orbit was Comet Encke, in 1821. Like Halley's comet, it is named after the calculator, the German mathematician and physicist Johann Franz Encke, that found it to be a periodic comet. Usually, comets get their names after their discoverer(s). Encke's comet has the shortest period of any comet, only 3.3 years, and because of this also the largest number of recorded appearances. It was also the first comet whose orbit was noticed to be influenced by non-gravitational forces (see below). Although it is now usually too faint to be visible with the naked eye, it may have been a bright comet a few thousand years ago, before most of its surface ice had evaporated. So far, it is not known to have been observed before 1786, but improved analysis of its earlier orbit might show that it corresponds to observations mentioned in ancient sources. If it is a very old comet, its only naked-eye visibility would however have been many thousands of years ago. The time would be even longer if it was originally a large comet, such as Comet Hale-Bopp, and if the comet was even larger, for instance a Centaur, it would take hundreds of thousands of years to wear out.

Studies of physical characteristics

It was not until the space age that the physical makeup of comets could be proven. In the early 19th century, a German mathematician, Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel originated the theory that they were solid objects in a state of evaporation: from the study of their brightness, Bessel argued that the non-gravitational movements of Comet Encke were caused by jet forces created as material evaporated from the surface of the object. This idea was forgotten for more than a hundred years, before Fred Lawrence Whipple independently proposed the same idea in 1950. The model prposed by Bessel and Whipple soon became accepted. It was confirmed when an armada of spacecraft (including the European Space Agency's Giotto probe and the Soviet Union's Vega 1 and Vega 2) flew through the coma of Halley's comet in 1986 to photograph the nucleus and observed the jets of evaporating material. The American probe Deep Space 1 flew past the nucleus of Comet Borrelly on September 21 2001 and confirmed that the characteristics of Comet Halley are common on other comets as well.

Forthcoming space missions will add greater detail to our understanding of what comets are made of. The Stardust spacecraft, launched in February 1999, has already collected particles from the coma of Comet Wild 2 in January 2004, and will return the samples to Earth in a capsule in 2006. In [2005]], the Deep Impact probe will blast a crater on Comet Tempel 1 to study its interior. And in 2014, the European Rosetta space probe will orbit comet Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko and place a small lander on its surface.

See also

• List of comets
• List of periodic comets

External links

• Cometography.com
• David Jewitt overview of the comets
• Harvard: Lists and Plots: Comets
• Open Directory Project/Google: Comets