Comets and Meteors - Hot snowballs
Hot snowballs
Comets are often referred to as dirty snowballs because of their makeup: a mixture of ice and dust. They typically move through the solar system in orbits or revolutions around the Sun ranging from a few years to several hundred thousand years.
Astronomers theorize there may be more than one trillion comets zipping about the solar system, yet spotting a comet is rare. Most comets are located on the outskirts of the solar system in a giant sphere called the Oort cloudRegion of space beyond our solar system that theoretically contains about one trillion inactive comets., which surrounds the solar system. The comets in the Oort cloud can take over a million years to make a single revolution around the Sun. Occasionally one of these comets is pulled by a nearby star and gets pushed closer to the Sun. When it approaches the Sun it becomes visible to astronomers....
[The entire page is 470 words long]
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