Comets are typically enormous lumps of frozen gas, such as hydrogen, these typically originate in a huge "cloud" of comets, known as the Oort Cloud, located far outside of the Solar System.
These comets typically roam relatively slowly (approximatley 19000km/h) through the Oort Cloud until either hit by another object or more likely accelerated by a nearby stars gravitational field, this causes them to fly
off towards our Sun.
A comet orbits the Sun in an elliptical path and can take hundreds to millions of years to complete a single orbit. When one comes within a few million kilometres of the Sun it begins to melt and forms a visible head and two long tails one of dust and the other of gas. |
