SOLAR SYSTEM

Detailed explanation-1: -Comets. These are also known as the ‘dirty snowballs’. They are cosmic objects of frozen gasses, rocks and dust. These are not the tiny objects you imagine them to be.

Detailed explanation-2: -The nucleus is the solid, central part of a comet, once termed a dirty snowball or an icy dirtball. A cometary nucleus is composed of rock, dust, and frozen gases.

Detailed explanation-3: -Comets are sometimes called dirty snowballs or “icy mudballs". They are a mixture of ices (both water and frozen gases) and dust that for some reason didn’t get incorporated into planets when the solar system was formed. This makes them very interesting as samples of the early history of the solar system.

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.