The Study of Comets and Asteroids Essay

Hale Bopp can be described as having a large core consisted of dirt and ice. This being said, the average diameter of a normal comet is one to two miles while Hale Bopp is between twenty to twenty-five miles in diameter. It is recorded to be about the same age as the sun. Hale Bopp is located in the Oort Cloud solar system.

Other planets do affect the comet's orbit as each planet has their own gravitational pull. That being

They are objects made from rocks and metals that orbit the Sun but are too small to be considered as a planet.

Although most dwarf planets inhabit the Kuiper Belt, there is one notable exception that reside in the Asteroid Belt named Ceres. Dwarf planets are also notorious for following long elliptical orbits, while the planets, though they still follow an elliptical orbit, are on a much more circular path. Overall, dwarf planets

When investigating the other dwarf planets, many of them had several similarities, however, there were two that were slightly different than the others. Both Ceres and Vesta had different distances compared to the other dwarf planets. Ceres’s distance was 2.8 AU while Vesta’s was 2.36 AU. This is different compared to the other dwarf planets which have a much larger distance. For example, Sedna has 86 AU, Eris has a distance of 96.4 AU, and Haumea has a distance of 43.13 AU. This became an inconsistency, however, we did group these two planets in the third group. Despite this anomaly, all of their other properties fit the requirements for group three, such as mass, diameter, and density. Placing both Ceres and Vesta into group three was the best option compared to group 1 or 2 because the distance would be the only inconsistency when placed in group 3. If we were to place them into another group, factors such as diameter, density, and mass wouldn’t be

Most people in their lives have seen a shooting star and exclaimed, “Make a Wish!” However, this so called “shooting star” is actually the clue to how the solar system was created. While this rock object is in space it is called a meteoroid, and then it is called a meteor when it enters a planetary atmosphere. The friction of the meteoroid created by the incoming velocity causes it to heat up quickly, and in result a bright flash of light. As noted above, this is what people see when watching the sky. In addition, meteorites gave the first knowledge about abundances of chemical elements in the solar system in the 1930s through 1950s. Meteorites are the most ancient rocks known to mankind and have helped pave the way in the study of the formation

Asteroids are rocky leftovers with no air made during the formation of our solar system which revolves around the sun. They mostly stay in a ring around the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. The formation of these rocks is called an asteroid belt. This is the main asteroid belt, and contains more than 750,000 asteroids. Asteroids are not considered planets because of how small they are. These rocks don’t weigh very much compared to Earth’s moon. Our moon weighs more than all of the asteroids combined. Asteroids in the main belt were formed around 4.6 billion years ago because the planet Jupiter prevented any planetary bodies from forming in the gap between Mars and itself. This caused objects to collide and form asteroids.

When a meteor entered Earth's atmosphere, air in the atmosphere caused friction which made the meteor glow. The glowing meteors are called a meteoroid. A meteorite would be a meteor that fell to Earth. Antarctica would be the best place to find meteorites. All of the rocks in Antarctica are frozen in the ice layer. The rocks on top of the ice layer are meteorites. The meteorites are not broken up by weather.

As a comet hunter Charles Messier came across what are known now to be galaxies, nebulae, planetary nebulae and star clusters. With help from his assistant Pierre Méchain, Messier composed a list of them. Messier done this to make it easier to differentiate between the comets they were looking for and other objects. The list is made up of the objects that they could see from the north celestial pole to a celestial latitude

Gravity from many larger objects are the cause for the formation of the asteroid belt and the Oort

“It looks like they come out of the debris circling in a virtual field of rubble circling outside the orbits of the planets we call the Kuiper belt. We figure a giant passing body bumps them in our direction. We know it's not a matter of a giant body doing a wobble in its orbit because of the number of meteors we continue to see. In other words, the debris isn't the only thing coming our way. There's a giant body following them.”

Since they do fall to earth a lot, “asteroids typically top the list of extraterrestrial objects that could hit Earth” (Hernandez, 2012, p. 1). This is true but an asteroid would have to be pretty big in order for it to cause mass destruction.

The Kirkwood gaps in the asteroid belt are just one of many phenomenons that can be located within the solar system. One other phenomenon that exists is the Cassini Division within the rings of Saturn. If you observe a close up picture of Saturn, you will notice a gap between rings A and B. This gap is called the Cassini Division. There are other gaps that can be found within the rings of Saturn, but the Cassini Division is labeled the largest. It is about 4,800 km. wide. The gap is caused by the pull of Saturn's moon, Mimas. The moon Mimas is responsible for clearing out any material in the region. A ring particle in this gap circulates Saturn twice for every time Mimas circulates once. How this works is that if a ring particle is in the Cassini

our solar system, but they are unimportant compared to the nine major planets. In this paper I will discuss the planets and how they are each unique.

In 2006, the IAU set a definition for a planet in the solar system as the following: is in orbit around the Sun, has sufficient mass to assume a hydrostatic equilibrium (or a nearly spherical shape) and has cleared the neighborhood around the object. Dwarf Planets passed two of the three necessary requirements of the planet test. One is that they are always in orbit around the Sun and the other is that they are nearly spherical in shape. However, they did not pass the test of clearing its neighborhood of any debris. Planets are able to clear smaller bodies near its orbit such as small asteroids through collision, capture or gravitational disturbance. Dwarf planets lack the mass to do so. As a result, they have a weak gravitational force that is unable to keep its orbital influence cleared from asteroids that float around in the Kuiper Belt territory.