Asteroids

Asteroids are rocky objects. There are many different types of asteroid, consisting of different
amounts of metal, silicate and carbon.

They also have different histories. Some of them have completely melted like the planets,
whereas others have not melted but have been altered by water. This means there are a wide
variety of structures both inside and on the surface of asteroids, formed by their turbulent
existence.

Piles of rubble

asteroids are groups of several rocks, or rubble piles, held together by their own gravity. The
largest and oldest asteroids are nearly spherical and are made up lots of smaller rocks. These are
known as mature rubble piles.

Bigger asteroids are called minor planets. Newer asteroids may only contain a couple of large
rocks and are known as contact binaries.

The asteroid belt

Most asteroids are found in a belt orbiting the sun between Mars and Jupiter, 300,000,000
kilometres away. There are maybe millions of asteroids in the main belt. They are thought to be
debris from a planet that failed to form when the solar system was created.

These asteroids have, however, changed a lot from when they were first created due to billions of
years of collisions. During these collisions, fragments can break away. It is these fragments that
make up most of the meteorites that fall to Earth.   

Near-earth asteroids

Some asteroids get pushed out of the main asteroid belt by the massive planet Jupiter. As they
pass Jupiter, its gravity tugs on the asteroid, causing their orbit to wobble. This happens each
time the asteroid travels around the sun until eventually the wobble gets so big the orbit breaks
and the asteroid shoots away.

Sometimes these new paths cross the orbits of the terrestrial planets, including Earth. These
asteroids, typically up to 10 kilometres in diameter, can come very close to Earth, so are known
as near-earth asteroids. They have even been known to crash into Earth, generating craters
hundreds of kilometres across.
 Comets

Comets, with their long tails, appear like ghostly apparitions that glide across the night sky. In
fact, they are more like giant dirty snowballs because most of the time they are just a nucleus of
ice and dust a few metres across.

One tail or two

As comets get closer, heat from the sun melts the outside layer of a comet into water vapour.
Radiation from the sun, known as solar wind , pushes the water vapour, a gas, back into a tail
that can be hundreds of kilometres long. Because this tail is caused by the sun's radiation, it
always points away from the sun.

As the water vapour is released, dust also comes away. This dust is heavier than the water vapour
and the solar winds are not strong enough to push it back. The dust is swept away, following the
orbit of the comet as a second tail . It is the dust from comets that causes meteor showers on
Earth.

From the edge of the solar system

There are potentially trillions of comets. They are thought to come from a giant cloud that
surrounds the solar system. This is known as the Oort cloud and it extends one third of the way
to the closest star, some 3,750,000,000,000 kilometres (that's 25,000 times bigger than the
distance between the Earth and sun). 

These comets have very long orbits and can take as long as 30 million years to go around the
sun. Some comets are captured by the gravity of the large planets Jupiter and Saturn, which keep
these comets in shorter orbits of about 20 to 200 years.

The earliest part of the solar system

Because comets form so far away from the sun and contain ice throughout, they are thought to
have never fully melted. This means they should contain elements least changed by the
formation of the solar system.