How does an asteroid differ from a comet?
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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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