How can comet holmes grow to the size of our sun?

Question

I saw holmes orbit. How can the thing grow within a hundred years? I thought that it would shrink in a billion years. How can the Sun have enough power to hold it in orbit if it is growing? what am i missing here? best educated answer wins.

Answer 1

Some sort of explosive event happened on Comet Holmes on October 23; we don't currently know what it was. It is currently moving away from the Sun and will soon be moving away from the Earth as well. This explosion has led to a very rapid expansion of a cloud of gas and dust surrounding the comet. Since the comet is in the vacuum of space, there is nothing much to stop the cloud from expanding, so it has gone from a few km. in diameter to being larger than the Sun's diameter in just three weeks. However, the gas and dust in this ball is very very thin, not much more than vacuum itself, so has very little mass compared to the Sun, so it's continuing to move in the same orbit as it was before the event. This comet did exactly the same thing in the year it was discovered, 1892.

Answer 2

Comets are loose aggregations of mostly ices, dust, etc. When they get close to the sun, some ice melts and forms the coma (from Latin word for hair) and the tail.

The coma and the tail are just gas and dust that are evaporating from the comet and being lit by the sun. Because the comet has (almost) no gravity, it does not take long for the coma and the tail to grow very large, even though they contain very little matter.

Posters above are correct. The density inside the coma and the tail are even less than the best vacuum we can get in a laboratory on Earth.

The Chinese called them Broom Stars.

Answer 3

It's only it's dusty gaseous coma that is growing. Growing so much that it's now bigger in diameter than the sun!!!
Comet 17P Holmes, according to NASA, is giving off the gas and dust from 3 vents.
Whether the comet has been hit by a rock or this is a natural phenomenon, they don't know yet.
The coma is so thin that you can see background stars through it.

Answer 4

The part that grows is called the coma. It is a halo of excitied gases, and is not solid. If you were to bottle some of it and bring it to Earth, you would be hard pushed to make a vacuum so rarified in a laboratory.

Answer 5

it isnt growing...it is expanding as it grows closer to the sun because when something gets hot it expands. its mass is not changing so any gravity exerted on it stays the same, as does the gravity it exerts on other things.