UNIVERSE
COMETS
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Question
[CLICK ON ANY CHOICE TO KNOW THE RIGHT ANSWER]
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a ball of fire that crosses space.
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A small celestial body of the solar system that, when it approaches the Sun, leaves behind a luminous tail of thousands of kilometers.
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round object created by humans.
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None of the above
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Detailed explanation-1: -The nucleus contains icy chunks, frozen gases with bits of embedded dust. A comet warms up as it nears the Sun and develops an atmosphere, or coma. The Sun’s heat causes the comet’s ices to change to gases so the coma gets larger. The coma may extend hundreds of thousands of kilometers.
Detailed explanation-2: -The small bodies in the solar system include comets, asteroids, the objects in the Kuiper Belt and the Oort cloud, small planetary satellites, Triton, Pluto, Charon, and interplanetary dust.
Detailed explanation-3: -The comet nucleus is the dirty snowball that is essentially the entire comet when it is frozen and far from the Sun. The coma is a large, dusty atmosphere surrounding the nucleus, made up of sublimated gas mixed with dust.
Detailed explanation-4: -Some exist in a wide disk beyond the orbit of Neptune called the Kuiper Belt. We call these short-period comets. They take less than 200 years to orbit the Sun. Other comets live in the Oort Cloud, the sphere-shaped, outer edge of the solar system that is about 50 times farther away from the Sun than the Kuiper Belt.