COMET | Halley’s Comet | Comet Hale–Bopp | Comet Hyakutake | Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9 | Comet Leonard.

Comets are cosmic snowballs of frozen gases, rock, and dust that orbit the Sun. When frozen, they are the size of a small town. When a comet’s orbit brings it close to the Sun, it heats up and spews dust and gases into a giant glowing head larger than most planets. The dust and gases form a tail that stretches away from the Sun for millions of miles. There are likely billions of comets orbiting our Sun in the Kuiper Belt and even more distant Oort Cloud. The current number of known comets is 3,743. There are millions of comets, and they are all orbiting the Sun. Most take less than two hundred years to do so, and others travel much slower, potentially taking millions of years to complete an orbit. Comets spend most of their years in the Kuiper belt and Oort cloud. Every now and again two comets can crash into one another. When this happened, they often change direction, and this can throw them out towards the inner solar system. When a comet approaches the inner planets, it is warmed by the Sun. When t