what is the defference between a comet and a meteor?

Question

what is the difference between a comet and a meteor????????

Answer 1

Comets, as several people have pointed out, are large bodies of rock and ice that orbit the sun. When they come close enough to the sun, energy from the sun causes some of the ices to vaporize, causing a visible coma (cloud around the nucleus) and tail, consisting of gas and dust.

A meteor is the streak made in the upper atmosphere by a bit of high-velocity space debris. The bits of debris themselves are called meteoroids. The ones that produce predictable meteor showers are clouds of dust shed by comets. Other meteoroids are pieces of primordial matter that never accreted into planets, or chunks of matter broken off of larger bodies by impacts with asteroids.

A meteoroid that makes its way to the surface of Earth is called a meteorite. They can be stony, metallic, or both. Some meteorites have been identified as coming from Mars and the Moon.

Answer 2

A comet is usually a very large object, from a few hundred yards to several miles in diameter. Comets orbit the sun like the earth does. Our orbit is almost a circle, but a comet's orbit is very elliptical. If you traced a football on a sheet of paper, that shape would be elliptical. A comet's orbit will bring it in close to the sun where we might be able to see it like Hale-Bopp did and then it will swing way out to the farthest part of our solar system. Comets return time and time again. Sometimes it takes a very long time, thousands of years and sometimes it takes only a few years. Comet Halley will return to near earth each 76 years. When we see a comet in the sky, it will appear not to move very much while we watch even though it is moving at several thousand miles per hour. That is because it is far away and is usually moving towards us or away from us. A comet is like a dirty snowball. It is made of water ice, carbon dioxide ice, dust, rocks and other molecules. As it approaches the sun, the sunlight warms the ices and it sublimates, (that is, a solid turns to a gas without turning to a liquid). This gas points away from the sun and we see it as the comet's tail. The comet and its tail will be visible for several nights, sometimes even weeks. Its position will change a little each night.

Meteors are very different from comets but are sometimes related. A meteor is a small rock. Most are smaller than a grain of sand. They orbit the sun also, but we only see them when they enter our atmosphere. When this happens the meteor gets hot and makes the air around it glow. They move very fast and last only a few seconds. They are what we call "shooting stars" even though they are not stars at all. Just grains of sand. Sometimes bigger ones can actually reach the earth and we call these rocks from space meteorites. There are several meteor showers each year that occur when the earth passes through the dust cloud left by a comet.

Answer 3

A meteor is a small rocky mass that was formed when the Sol System began to form from the collapsing nebula cloud. Meteor are typically random pieces of debris that did not get picked by the planets as they coalesced into their present form. A comet, on the other hand, is a large chunck (Halley's comet is approximate 25 miles in diameter) of ice and rock that got dislodged from the Oort Cloud (located at the very edge of the Sol System). The Oort Cloud is thought to be the remnants of the nebula that collapsed to form our solar system.

Answer 4

Meteors drift freely approximately outer area and are many times small fragments of cloth left over by the tails of comets. they are the fabric that a comet sheds because of the fact the sunlight heats up the comet and motives it to spew ice, rock, etc. Comets are comparitively great bodies that orbit the sunlight and incorporate ice, rock, and assorted varieties of gas. they have rather elliptical orbits many times stretching previous the orbits of our photograph voltaic device's planets (particular, which includes the dwarf planet Pluto :). Asteroids are many times rocky purely, no ice, and return and forth in a regular orbit between Mars and Jupiter. they vary in length from a small residing house to a medium city. except disturbed by different asteroids or another photograph voltaic device concentrated visitor (like a comet) they stay interior of that orbital course. so a techniques as anybody is familiar with, great spaceship-eating monsters do no longer stay interior asteroids as shown in between the famous person Wars video clips (anybody? anybody?). i did no longer see the item yet there is hardly any confusion between a meteor and an asteroid or comet. it is available that there could desire to be confusion between whether or no longer something became a comet or asteroid, although. If the item became pertaining to Tunguska (sp?), ever because of the fact the incident approximately a hundred years in the past, there has been debate as to whether it became an asteroid or a comet that brought about the devastation.

Answer 5

a comet does not enter the earth's atmosphere

a meteor is just a comet that has hit the earth's atmosphere

all meteors are comets, but not all comets become meteor

Answer 6

a comet is a piece of space rock that burns out in the earth's atmosphere.
a meteor is that same comet, IF and only IF that rock manages to reach earth's surface. (most probably causing a crater)

Answer 7

Meteors are rocks. Comets are ice.

Answer 8

usually comets are bigger, they have a fixed cycle where they come back and a fixed route, they are composed of rock and often ice while meteors are smaller, random and inpredictable for the route and they don't pass periodically in the same universe quadrant

Answer 9

comets are mostly rock and ice and meteors are mostly rock

Answer 10

comets are comprised of ice and frozen gases

meteors are rocks or chunks of iron