Science: Comets

Fact 1: A comet travels about 2000 miles per hour. From Wikipedia.

Fact 2: If the comet goes next to the sun it speeds up to about 100,000 miles per hour. From Wikipedia.

Fact 3:Comets are sorted into four categories: periodic comets (e.g. Halley's Comet), non-periodic comets (e.g. Comet Hale–Bopp), comets with no meaningful orbit (the Great Comet of 1106), and lost comets (5D/Brorsen). From Wikipedia. 

Fact 4: Scientist Spitzer studied comet composition.  He detected clays; iron-containing compounds; carbonates, the minerals in seashells; crystallized silicates, such as the green olivine minerals; and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, carbon-containing compounds found in car exhaust and on burnt toast From Cool Cosmos. 

Fact5: NEOWISE. That is the name of the comet that you can see in the sky as I am making this blog post. We saw it earlier in the week! 

A picture of comet NEOWISE taken by astronomers at Lowell Observatory here in Flagstaff.  

Book facts.

1: The sun's warmth heats up the comet causing the ice to melt inside of it.

2: The inside of a comet is a jumbled up mess of rocky dust and lumps of ice.

3: A comet's tail faces away from the sun.

4: A comet has two tails a gas tail and a dust tail. We see the dust tail because it reflects light. 

My fact: The difference between a meteor and a comet is mostly ice.