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Asked by shasow15 to Colm, Eoin, Joseph, Lauren, Stephen on 14 Nov 2013.
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Lauren Mc Keown answered on 14 Nov 2013:
A comet is commonly known as a “dirty snowball”. It has two tails – an ion tail and a dust tail, a hard core, a “coma” of gas and dust surrounding the core and it usually lives in the outer reaches of the Solar system. If it is knocked off – path, it sometimes comes in to visit us and we are might be lucky enough to see it as a bright object passing through the sky. It is made up of water, ice, dirt and other things. Most interestingly, it contains organic molecules such as glycine – an amino acid found here on Earth! Scientists think that comet bombardment may have been involved in why we have life here on Earth – so they may seem scary when they hit us, but we probably do have a lot to thank them for 😉
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colm bracken answered on 18 Nov 2013:
Comets are like asteroids but consist more of water-ice and dirt rather than the rocky asteroids. When they come in fro a flying visit and as they get closer to the Sun they begin to heat up. When they heat up some of the water-ice turns into steam and we see the familiar tail of the comet. What is interesting about the tail is that whether the comet is going toward the Sun or moving away from it the tail is always pointing away from the Sun. The last comet I saw with my bare eyes was Haley’s Comet. However more recently NASA released footage of a comet impacting the planet Jupiter. It was awesome and it left huge scars dotted across the surface of Jupiter. If it had hit Earth it would have been very bad news. But Jupiter is great at sucking up all those dangerous nearby objects so that we don’t need to worry so much.
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