Comets are made mainly of dry ice, water, ammonia, methane, iron, magnesium, sodium and silicates. Due to the low temperatures of comets, these substances are frozen.
The Solar System saw its birth product of a huge cloud of gas and dust, which collapsed 4.6 billion years ago.
Halley comet
Most of the cloud, flattened in a disk around a young sun, was grouped to form the planets.
However, some small chunks remained and became chunks of frozen gas and dust, which live in the outer region of the Solar System, where it is cold enough to make frozen ice creams that give kites their tail.
How are comets formed and what are they made of?
Comets originate in the outer solar system and tend to be constantly affected by the approach of the larger planets, causing their orbits to change constantly.
Some are carried to orbits whose path makes them travel very close to the Sun Destroying themselves completely, while others are simply sent forever out of the solar system.
Astronomers argue that comets are made up of materials from the primitive nebula with which the solar system was formed, in the form of ice and dust, from which the planets and their moons were then condensed.
What is your composition?
Comets are smaller bodies of the Solar System composed of dry ice, water, ammonia, methane, iron, magnesium, sodium and silicates, which orbit around the sun following different elliptic, parabolic or hyperbolic trajectories.
Due to the low temperatures of the places where they are, these substances are frozen.
The dimensions that a comet can measure are truly large, reaching several tens of kilometers.
Scientists think that within the materials composing comets are organic materials that are determinants of life, which after early impacts on the primitive solar system, especially on earth, could have given rise to living beings.
The cometary queue
All these components when approaching the sun are activated and what is called sublimation is produced, which is nothing more than the volatilization of the components of these.
In other words, it is a change from solid to gaseous state directly without going through the liquid state. Product of this process appears in the comet the cometaria queue characteristic.
Dirty Ice Balls
Fred L. Whipple was an astronomer who specialized in the study of comets and is considered the precursor of cometary study.
Around the year 1950, Whipple was one of those who proposed that comets were"dirty balls of ice", which was not totally unwise.
All the components of a comet, being far from the Sun, remain in the solid state, but because of their trajectory and as they approach the Sun, all these components are volatilized by the process of sublimation Which has already been described.
These volatile elements of the comet are separated from the nucleus and are projected backward, ie in the opposite direction to the sun, due to the effects of the solar wind.
As this happens, the comets sublimate materials in their approach to the sun, fulfilling elliptical orbits and decreasing in magnitude.
After the comets have completed a certain number of orbits, it ends up being turned off, and when the last materials susceptible to it are volatilized, the former comet will become a simple ordinary asteroid, because it will not be able to recover mass in That state.
Some examples of this can be found in the asteroids 7968-Elst-Pizarro and 3553-Don Quixoteel that were formerly comets whose volatile materials were depleted.
Comets with variable orbits
There are comets whose orbit is long or very long, with a long or very long period that come from the hypothetical cloud of Oort, and others that by its short period orbit, come from the belt of Edgeworth-Kuiper, located beyond the orbit Of Neptune.
One of the most famous comets is the comet Halley, which represents an exception to this rule since, although it has a short period of 76 years, it comes from the Oort cloud, which bears the name of the astronomer Jan Hendrik Oort, composed of remnants of the condensation of the nebula between 50 000 and 100 000 AU of the Sun.
It should be noted that many of the comets that approach the Sun follow elliptical orbits so elongated that they only return after thousands of years.
Formation by aggregation and accumulation
The initial formation of the cometary nuclei is explained by several models that determine that these were formed by aggregation and accumulation of materials.
Some of these models are:
- Model developed by Fred Whipple, in 1950, called Whipple Conglomerate.
- Littleton's model, or accumulation of primitive debris, developed in 1948
- Finally and more recently in 2004 the Model of Aggregation of ice and silicates in the disk protoplanetarios, developed by Wednschilling.
Composition of comets by parts
To study the composition of comets it is necessary to divide it into its structural parts, which are three: the nucleus, the comma, and the tail.
The nucleus
The core consists mostly of water and a conglomerate of ice, dust grains and carbon monoxide.
Once the core has been warmed by the sun, the ice becomes sublimated, which produces the release of the gas found in the dust grains.
The nucleus, in turn, is a solid body that has an irregular shape and whose density is usually low, and a size that oscillates between 100 and 40 km.
They move thanks to the gravitational action of the sun, in addition to the other bodies that comprise the solar system, as well as the reaction that is produced once the gas is expelled.
It has been detected, thanks to the investigations that have been carried out, that there is a great variety of compounds, both in the commas, as in the queues.
It is now known that the predominantly volatile components in both parts of the comet are mainly water, followed by carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, methanol, and other components such as methane, hydrogen sulfide and ammonia, as well as pieces of other 60 Different compounds.
The cola
The tails of comets may have different variations in the form of filaments or gybes produced by the incidence of different interplanetary magnetic fields.
Occasionally, such imperfections that are observed in the structure of the tails, or even the presence of emanations that emerge directly from the nucleus, occur due to the very nature of the nucleus and the distribution of the materials that compose it.
Comma
The comma is a nebula of dust and gas that sometimes has certain bright structures such as jets, layers or fans.
References
- Pierson Barretto (2010) Comet's Chemical Composition and Nuclei Structure. Retrieved from sites.google.com
- Gemma Lavender, How are comets made? (2015) Recovered from spaceanswers.com
- Veronica Casanova (2014) Comets: complete guide. Structure and composition of comets. Retrieved from astrofisicayfisica.com
- Comet (s.f.) In Wikipedia. Retrieved on July 7, 2017 from es.wikipedia.org
- Jose Vicente Díaz Martínez. (S.f) The Kites: Definition and Classifications Retrieved from josevicentediaz.com
- The Origin of Asteroids, Meteoroids, and Trans-Neptunian Objects (s.f.) Center for Scientific Creation. Recovered from creationscience.com