What is the difference between a comet and an asteroid?
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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
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