What's the difference between a shooting star and a comet?

Answer 1

shooting star: meteor burning in earth's atmosphere
comet: body of ice and dust that usually orbits the sun

Answer 2

A shooting star (called a meteor) is a small thing - a piece of space debris, dust or a pebble that enters Earth's atmosphere and burns up from the friction. They are local events, visible only for about 50 miles or less, and last only a second or 2.

Comets are large icy/rocky objects in long elliptical orbits around the sun. When they get close to the sun the heat starts to melt and then vaporize the ices on the surface and just below the surface. These look like steam geysers, and they fan out into space behind the comet for up to a million kilometers. They can be seen from almost anywhere on Earth, and can last for days, weeks, even months.
They are bright, long wispy objects in the sky and are quite beautiful.

Many of the meteor showers the Earth passes through are actually debris trails left behind by comets as they moved through the inner solar system.

Answer 3

comet: a relatively larger body (tens of kilometres) made of very volatile materials like ice and snow and dust and stuff. As it approaches the sun, the ice turns to gas and the dust is freed. Most of the gas and the dust form a "head" around the nucleus and is visible as a fuzzy ball.

The pressure from the sunlight pushes the gas and the dust slowly away from the comet and the head. The gas gets so tenuous that the charged particles from the sun act on it like electricity in a neon tube. There may be a "tail" pointing directly away from the sun -- whatever the direction in which the comet moves.

The dust is also pushed away by the sunlight (being hit by photons). The dust particles are now orbiting at a slightly different speed than the comet itself. If there is enough dust, it will be visible and may form a slightly curved tail (also away from the sun).

Some comets can be visible for months.

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A shooting star (meteor) is usually a tiny pebble (the bright ones may be as big as your thumb) that enter Earth's atmosphere at very high speed. The ram pressure cause the air to glow visibly just in front of the pebble while the pebble itself is abraded by the air rushing past. At that speed, the air molecules are like sand paper.

A shooting star lasts a few seconds.

Answer 4

Adding to previous answer, a meteor is only seen in our upper atmosphere, and is a flash that is gone in a second or two.

A comet is an astro body that orbits the sun and remains in the sky for days/weeks/months.

After 300 years of knowing basically what comets are (in their motions, anyway) people today stillexpect to see a comet move across the sky.

You will not see a comet moving. If you do, it is close enough for the world to be in real trouble.

Although comets do not contain dense nuclei, there have been comets that have comas (their heads) as big as the sun (ie nearly a million miles across).

Meteors are tiny fragments.

Chalk and cheese, mate. Although many meteors are fragments left over by comets.

Answer 5

A shooting star is a meteor that has entered the earth's atmosphere. You can see a quick trail of a shooting star some nights. Particularly in August or Nov (here in Eastern US) when there are meteor showers.

A comet is an ice covered rock that orbits the sun. Halley's comet takes 75 years to complete its orbit. Comets have tails of glowing gas and dust (we think). When we see a comet it looks like a meteor that is standing still in the sky.

Ok, that isn't very scientific; but that is how it looked to me when I went out to see Hale-Bopp.

Answer 6

They look very different when you observe them; and they are two very different kinds of object.

A "shooting star," more properly called a meteor, is a small rock, generally about the size of a peanut. There are lots of these small rocks throughout space, and they often run into the earth's atmosphere. When they hit our atmosphere, they're moving so fast that the friction with the air causes them to burn up. Because of this, they glow brightly for one or two seconds as they streak across the sky. When you see a meteor, it's typically about 60 to 100 miles over your head.

A comet is a completely different thing. A comet is a rock that is usually a few MILES across, and they very rarely come close to the earth. Their tails are MILLIONS of miles long, compared to meteors, whose tails (if any) are at most a couple of miles long. Their tails are not caused by friction, but by solar wind from the sun, gently blowing evaporated gases away from the comet.

A comet's orbit will take it close to the sun (where it's visible from earth) over the course of weeks or months. So when you see a comet in the sky, you can't see it moving: all you see is a rock-steady bright spot with an unmoving tail extending from it. Contrast this with a meteor, which zips across the sky with an apparent speed faster than an airplane's.

So:

Size:
Meteor: about an inch
Comet: about a mile or more

Closest approach to earth:
Meteor: about 60 miles
Comet: usually tens of millions of miles

Length of tail:
Meteor: a mile of two (often no tail at all)
Comet: millions of miles

Appearance in sky:
Meteor: bright, zips across the sky in a second or two.
Comet: Usually dim, takes days to move across the sky.

Answer 7

A shooting star is a fragement of a comet or mass of small bebris buring up in the Earth's atomospher, while a COMET is a mass of ice and debris that burns up a bit due to proximity to the SUN.

Answer 8

A shooting star is a meteor which by definition means it has entered the atmosphere, a comet describes an icy mass outside the atmosphere.

Answer 9

Basically, comets are still orbiting in space, and shooting stars are space debris that enter the Earth's atmosphere, usually burning up. Links below explain it best.

Answer 10

They're is no difference between them because a COMET is always mistaken as a SHOOTING STAR...

Answer 11

a comet is a burning ball of gas, ice traveling through space, sometimes in an orbit (like haley's comet which our orbit brings us near on a regular basis), while a "Shooting Star" is a piece of space debris (rock, ice, comet dust, space garbage) that enters our atmosphere and burns up.