SOLAR SYSTEM

Detailed explanation-1: -Small rocky objects that orbit around the Sun are known as meteoroids. Mostly, they are debris cast off from comets and asteroids. When they cross into the Earth’s atmosphere, meteoroids become meteors.

Detailed explanation-2: -Comets are like “dirty snowballs” that have orbited the Sun since our Solar System formed, billions of years ago.

Detailed explanation-3: -Comets are loosely packed dirty snowballs, formed of various ices (i.e. water, carbon dioxide, methane, ammonia, carbon monoxide, and cyanide/cyanogen) as well as dirt and rocks.

Detailed explanation-4: -A model of a comet’s nucleus, proposed by F. L. Whipple in 1949, and confirmed by the Giotto space probe to Halley’s Comet in 1986. According to this model, cometary nuclei consist of a relatively solid conglomerate of frozen ices and dust, rather than a loose ‘flying sandbank’ as suggested by an alternative model.