if a comet is like a dirty snowball and leaves a tail,why does it not disintegrate instead of coming back?

Question

like hailey's

Answer 1

They do disitnigrate slowly over time, Haley's comet is rather large compared to some comets. For example the recent comet Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 passed by us in dozens of fragments. Two orbts ago the comet broke apart and is rapidly disintigrating, in a few more passes the comet will probably be gone.

It takes a while because the comet only looses a little bit of mass each time it passes near the sun, when it is far away it remains static.

Answer 2

Comets are invisible except when they are near the Sun. Most comets have highly eccentric orbits which take them far beyond the orbit of Pluto; these are seen once and then disappear for millennia. Only the short- and intermediate-period comets (like Comet Halley), stay within the orbit of Pluto for a significant fraction of their orbits.

After 500 or so passes near the Sun off most of a comet's ice and gas is lost leaving a rocky object very much like an asteroid in appearance. (Perhaps half of the near-Earth asteroids may be "dead" comets.) A comet whose orbit takes it near the Sun is also likely to either impact one of the planets or the Sun or to be ejected out of the solar system by a close encounter.. enough

Answer 3

They are snowballs miles across so take many years of evaporate. Comets pass through the warm part of the solar system rapidly so only evaporate for a few months every few 100 years.
There a millions of comets out there so as old ones vanish new ones appear.

Answer 4

Because it is a ball of ice and rock and space is cold. If the comet's orbit around the sun decays enough to where it is pulled into the sun, then the comet will be destroyed.

Answer 5

Sometimes they do disintegrate. Not every time, but sometimes. The heat and solar wind from the Sun are just not strong enough to destroy every comet on the first close passage.

Answer 6

Because only a very small amount of surface material is need to maket that tail. They are fairly large as those things go. And it's ice, not snow, that's just a euphemism.

Answer 7

Density

Answer 8

nobody has considered that long periodic comets may well pick up mass on their travels that may well compensate for or even exceed the mass they lose on a solar encounter.

short period comets do eventually fade and die

Answer 9

Its very big and disintergrating very slowly. Most of the time it does not leave a tail, only when near the sun.

Answer 10

I see comets as non atomic.Burst stuff.