What is the difference between a comet and an asteroid?
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A comet is composed primarily of water ice along with other frozen gases. It may have a rocky core, but the comet’s ice is its distinguishing feature. When it gets close to a star, a comet will begin shedding its ice and leave a tail.
An asteroid is, more or less, just a big rock, though it could have ice and other elements on its surface and in the interior.
It says what it’s made of. If you threw a big block of ice in space, that would be a comet. If you threw a big rock in space, that would be an asteroid.
Comets are loosely held together and come in from the outer solar system, graze the sun (relatively speaking) and then go back out. They form a tail as they get closer to the sun.
Asteroids are more solid pieces of rock that orbit the sun in a more regular manner. The orbits may still be irregular around the sun, but not as extreme as comets.
Its gotten muddier through the years as we’ve gotten better telescopes
Super high level – a comet is made of dirt and ice and comes in close to the sun and has a tail of dust and gas behind it from the sun vaporizing part of it. This gives it the comet like appearance in the sky. Asteroids stay in a relatively stable orbit inside of Jupiter’s orbit and don’t have a tail because they’re made of rock
[Except for the Active Asteroids that have tails, whoops!](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_asteroid)
[And also except for Trojans that follow the outer planets](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neptune_trojan)
We made a bunch of rules early on with bad observational data. Comets have tails we can see therefore they’re made of ice(right), asteroids don’t have tails therefore they’re not(wrong). A lot of lines were pretty arbitrary and the more data we get and the more different rocks we look at the less different they all are and they’re harder to split into neat groups. We’ve found asteroid like things with ice, we’ve determined that most asteroids are more like balls of gravel than balls of granite, and we’ve seen them in places we couldn’t before
A comet is in an elliptical orbit around the Sun, so they tend to come back with a fair degree or regularity an asteroid is a lump of rock in space which has been dislodged from it’s normal position in the solar system .
Comets are icy bodies that are very loosely held together. Very far from the sun and usually with highly eccentric orbits.
Asteroids are rocky bodies that tend to be much closer to the Sun. They can be rocky, metallic, or carbony.
Don’t a comet’s tail trail the comet, or does it always point away from the sun?
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