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Asteroid Act 1

Comets are icy bodies that orbit the sun and originate from the Oort Cloud. They have three parts - a nucleus, coma made of vaporized gases, and a tail formed by radiation pressure from the sun pushing away particles. Halley's Comet orbits every 76 years. Meteoroids are small rocks and dust that move through space. Meteors are meteoroids that burn up entering Earth's atmosphere, appearing as falling stars. Larger meteoroids may reach the ground as meteorites. Meteor showers occur when Earth passes through comet debris trails. Asteroids orbit the sun in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Some scientists believe an asteroid impact caused the extinction of dinosaurs, though

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Andrelyn Bareza
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30 views

Asteroid Act 1

Comets are icy bodies that orbit the sun and originate from the Oort Cloud. They have three parts - a nucleus, coma made of vaporized gases, and a tail formed by radiation pressure from the sun pushing away particles. Halley's Comet orbits every 76 years. Meteoroids are small rocks and dust that move through space. Meteors are meteoroids that burn up entering Earth's atmosphere, appearing as falling stars. Larger meteoroids may reach the ground as meteorites. Meteor showers occur when Earth passes through comet debris trails. Asteroids orbit the sun in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. Some scientists believe an asteroid impact caused the extinction of dinosaurs, though

Uploaded by

Andrelyn Bareza
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Other Members of the Solar System

We know that our solar system is made up of the sun and the eight planets. Are there
other members of the solar system that you know?
COMETS
What are comets? Where do they come from? Comets are icy bodies that orbit the sun. In
the 1950’s, a Dutch Astronomer named Jan H. Oort, proposed a theory stating that a large cloud
of materials can be found beyond our solar system. These are millions of icy balls, gas and dust
that exist in what we call as the Oort Cloud. The gravitational pull of a passing star may cause
one of these balls to fall out and orbit around the sun. Such object is called comet.
There are three basic parts of a comet: the nucleus which is a solid matter found at the
center of the comet, the coma which is made up of cloud of vapor that encircles the nucleus as
sunlight evaporates some of its ice. The coma and the nucleus make up the comet’s head. Comets
have the third part, the tail which appears only when it gets closer to the sun and disappears as it
gets farther from the sun. The tail of the comet always points away from the sun because it is
blown outward by the solar wind. Most of the comets develop tails that can extend for millions
of kilometers as they approach the sun. Early astronomers believe that the sun has a strong force
that drives away particles of the coma to develop tail. This is because the tail of a comet points
away from the sun in a slightly curved manner. Later, scientists identified the two solar forces
that cause tail formation. First is the radiation pressure brought by radiant energy from the sun
and the second is the solar wind, a stream of charged particles emitted from the sun. Oftentimes a
single tail comet is produced which is composed of both dust and ionized gases, but comets with
two tails are observed, too. The second tail is formed when the extremely light ionized gases are
pushed directly away from the sun. The gases producing the coma re-condense, the tail vanishes,
and the comet returns to cold storage as a comet’s orbit drives it away from the sun. Object that
was blown form the coma to produce the tail disappears. The inactive comet which looks like an
asteroid sustains its orbit without a coma or tail when all the gases are removed. Scientists
believe that few comets continue to be active for more than a few hundreds close orbits of the
sun.
The most famous comet, Halley’s comet, discovered by Edmund Halley in 1682,
revolves around the sun once every 76 years. If this comet came near the Earth last 1986, when
will it come back?

METEOROIDS/METEOR/METEORITES
We do know that particles like space rocks and dust can strike the Earth. There are small
rocks and grains of sand that move through space. These are called meteoroids. Meteoroids are
rocky bodies ranging from the size of a grain to tens of meters in diameter. Meteoroids that are
1mm in diameter originates from the tails of comets. Meteoroids that are larger in size are
remnants from asteroid collisions. When these rocky bodies pass through the Earth’s atmosphere,
most of them burn up because of friction and when they do; they are called meteors or falling
stars. If meteors are quite large, parts of them may not burn up as they enter the Earth’s
atmosphere. The rocky body will fall and hit the ground and will be named meteorites.
Meteorites are classified according to their composition. These are (1) iron meteorites
that are mostly composed of iron with 5-20 percent nickel, (2) stony also known as chondrites,
composed of silicate minerals with mixture of other minerals and (3) stony-iron, combination of
the two.
We sometimes witness meteor showers on Earth. This happens when Earth passes
through the dusty orbit of a comet. Meteor showers occurs when Earth encounters a group of
meteoroids travelling in the same direction at nearly the same speed as Earth. Some meteoroids
not included in the orbits of known comets are most likely the remains of the nucleus of a comet.
Earth passes through the spot where a comet left its dust. In August, Perseid meteor shower is
evident and likely to be materials emitted from the Swift-Tuttle on its previous approaches to the
sun. The table below shows the major meteor showers in 2016.

Major Meteor Showers in 2016


Shower Approximate Dates Peak Activity Meteor Comet of Origin
Count
Lyrids April 22-23 20 meteors/hr Thatcher
Eta Aquarilds May 6-7 45 meteors/hr Halley
Southers Delta July 28-29 20 meteors/hr unknown
Aquarilds
Perseids August 11-12 As many as 200 Swift-Tuttle
meteors/hr
Orionids October 21-22 20 meteors/hr Halley
Leonids November 17-18 15 meteors/hr Tempel-Tuttle
Geminids December 13-14 120 meteors/hr Phaethon
ASTEROIDS
Asteroids are large rocky materials with some metals in it. Most of them are found in the
asteroid belt. It is a region between Mars and Jupiter. They orbit the sun just like what the planets
do. They are sometimes known or called as planetoids or minor planets. Is it true that the Earth
was hit by an asteroid? Some scientists think that a collision between the Earth and an asteroid
caused the extinction of dinosaurs. But this belief has not yet been proven

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