How does an asteroid differ from a comet?
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Look up the asteroid belt that orbits between Mars and Jupiter.
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An asteroid, more or less, is a big rock. They’re made of different materials but it’s primarily rocky.
Comets come from further reaches of the solar system, and they’re made primarily of ice. They have tails because that’s their material being blasted away as they whoosh by the sun.
Asteroid = giant boulder. Comet = giant dirty ice cube.
The difference isn’t that much. Asteroids are the rocky/metallic bits that were left orbiting the Sun after planet formation. Comets typically come from interstellar space or have highly elliptical (high eccentricity) orbits periodicity paying a visit to the inner solar system. They tend to have lots of ice and when the Sun heats them up you get the signature tail.
Thats the key difference. If you look around the classification in astronomy you tend to encounter things that are labelled differently but aren’t that different. (Think of asteroids and meteors, technically a mateor is something an asteroid does.) This is mainly because astronomers discover and classify things based on how they look on the sky or throw a telescope so sometimes they end up giving a special case of something a different name. Still comets are rock, metal and ice like most asteroids but the tail, now that looks pretty distinct.
Asteriods are rocky and metallic solid objects that orbit the Sun in roughly circular orbits, most of them between Mars and Jupiter. They don’t have tails, and aren’t visible without a telescope — and even then, most of them you can’t see without a BIG one because they don’t reflect light very well. If you do look at one through a telescope, it’ll mostly look like a bright dot.
Comets have been described as “dirty snowballs” — big balls of ice with some other chemicals mixed in. They also orbit the Sun, but in really oval-shaped (elliptical) orbits that take them far away from the Sun most of the time, but then dramatically dive in very close to the Sun — closer than Mercury even sometimes!
As a comet gets close to the Sun, the heat and radiation from the Sun cause the comet to start to evaporate some of the comet, which makes a dramatic streaky tail point away from the Sun. It’s easily visible in a small telescope, and the brightest ones you can even see without a telescope. It will swoop close around the Sun in a few weeks or months, and then shoot off again to the far reaches of the Solar System for decades or even centuries before another sudden dramatic solar fly-by.
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