By: Tiernan Moore

Comet Facts

• Comets, also known as dirty snowballs, they are small objects composed of ice and dirt

• Comets are sometimes mistaken as asteroids but they are different because they have tails made of dirt and gas that trails behind them

• Most comets travel all the way out past Pluto when orbiting the sun

• The comets that pass close to the sun probably came from the Oort Cloud or the Kuiper Belt

Parts of a Comet

• The center of a comet is called the Nucleus, and it is usually 1- 10 miles across

• When the Nucleus gets closer to the sun the ice starts to melt, and they start dragging dust that the sun reflects off of, which is called the Coma. That is the part of the comet that you usually see.

• The dust particles that are leaving the Nucleus form what is called the Dust Tail.

• The gas molecules evaporate from the ice are ionized by the sun and form the Ion Tail

• Asteroids are small parts of comets or meteors• Asteroids are made up of rock, carbon, or metal• Asteroids stay in orbit around the sun• They can be anywhere from a few feet across to

a few hundred miles across• Most asteroids are in between Mars and Jupiter

in something called The Asteroid Belt

Asteroid Facts

Asteroid Belt

• The Asteroid Belt is in between the inner planets that consist of Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars and the outer planets that contain Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and Uranus

• Over 7000 asteroids have already be discovered from earth and hundreds more are discovered each year

• There are also hundreds of thousands more that you can not even see

• The largest asteroid ever recorded is Ceres and it is 914 km across

Meteor Facts

• Meteors are streaks of light • People call meteors shooting stars when in fact

they really aren’t stars at all• It is made by small pieces of rock, dust or metal

entering the atmosphere and burning up• They are called meteoroids when floating in

space but once they enter the atmosphere they are called meteors and if they hit the earth they are called meteorites

Meteors- fireball

• If a meteor produces enough light to cast a shadow on the earth it is then called a fireball

• There are several thousand of fireballs each day though most of them are over the ocean of uninhabited regions

• A fireball can explode at the end of its “life” and if they do explode they are then called a bolide

• Generally a fireball is brighter than magnitude -4, which is the same magnitude as Venus

The Moon

• The moon is basically a natural satellite of the earth• It takes the moon 27.3 to orbit the earth just one

time• About every six months there is a solar eclipse • A solar eclipse is when the moon passes between the

sun and the earth to block the light from the sun• You can only see a solar eclipse from certain places

on earth

The Phases of the Moon

• There are eight phases of the moon• They are new moon, waxing crescent, first quarter,

waxing gibbous, full moon, waning moon, third quarter, waning crescent, and back to new moon

• The reasons that the moon looks different is because of were the sun is, for example when the moon is full it is because the moon and the earth are on different sides of the earth and when we have a new moon it is because the moon and the sun are on the same side so the light off the moon doesn’t reflect toward the earth

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