What are comets and why do they have tails?
Since the beginning of recorded history, people have been in awe and in fear of comets, star-like objects with “long hair” that appeared in the sky unannounced and unpredictably. We`ve discovered that these star-like objects are dirty-ice formed when our solar system began around 4.6 billion years ago. They are the least-changed objects in our solar system and, may give us essential clues about how our solar system was formed. We can predict the orbits of many of them, but not all. New discoveries all the time Around a dozen of these objects are discovered each year. Short-period comets are more predictable because they take less than 200 years to orbit the Sun. Most come from a region of icy bodies beyond the orbit of Neptune. These icy objects are variously called Kuiper Belt Objects, Edgeworth-Kuiper Belt Objects, or trans-Neptunian Objects. Long-period comets are less predictable, many of them come from a distant region called the Oort cloud about 100,000 astronomical units (that i
