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| Asteroids, Comets & Co |
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Many people don't know exactly the differences between asteroids
and comets or meteorites and meteors and often misuse these
terms. Here we want to give a general survey with brief
descriptions of the small bodies in our solar system
 Asteroids
Asteroids
are also called minor planets or planetoids. They are
rocky objects ranging on size from a few hundred meters
to almost thousand kilometers. The largest and first
known asteroid, Cers, was discovered in 1801.
To date over 5000 minor planets have been found, some
of them were lost and discovered again. Most asteroids
are located in the asteroid belt, between the orbits
of Mars and Jupiter. |
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wellknown Asteroids:
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Comets
Comets
are often compared to "dirty snowballs". Actually
they are frozen bodies composed of various ices and
dust, generally less than 10 kilometers across.
Today, scientists assume that most comets are located
outside the solar system in the so called Oort Cloud.
Only a few of them are occasionally ejected by collosion
with one another and traver into the inner solar system.
As they near the sun, some of the surface ices melt
and gases adn clust particles fly away from the sun,
forming the coma and teh tails. |
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wellknown Comets:
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