Comets
Like asteroids and meteoroids, comets were formed by space matter (ice, frozen gases, dust, rocks and metal) that was left over when the solar system was formed. Like huge, dirty snowballs comets orbit the Sun. As they near the Sun its rays warm the icy snowball and begin to vaporize it. Producing a brightly shinning coma (a huge sphere of gas and dust surrounding the comets nucleus), a gas tail and a dust tail. Even though the comets nucleus might be only a few miles wide, its tail may measure more than a million miles across and up to sixty million miles long. The appearance of new comets in unpredictable, but there are some comets visible to the naked eye that return at regular internals. The best known and brightest of these is Halley's Comet which appears in our skies every seventy six years. New comets can come from far beyond the planets perhaps as far away as 4.5 million miles. Comet Hyakutake in 1996 ws a new comet with a period of 16,000 years.
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