1. Comets, Asteroids, and Meteors
Chapter 14 Section 5

2. Comets Think of: Dirty Snowball Literally means: “long-haired star”
Loose collections of ice, dust, and small rocky particles
Orbit in long, narrow ellipses

3. Comets Structure of a comet: Head Tail Nucleus – inner solid core
Coma – could of gas and dust
Tail
Gas Tail (Points away from the sun)
Dust Tail
Up to 62 million miles long

4. Where do comets come from?
The Kuiper Belt (K-eye-per)
Donut shaped region beyond Neptune
Short, Circular Orbit
100x as far from the sun as Earth
9.2 billion miles from Sun
Oort Cloud (Ort, like in “short”)
Sphere-shaped area of comets 1,000x to 10,000x farther from the sun than pluto
Long Orbit
At least 4 trillion miles from Sun

5. Asteroids Too small to be planets Less than 1 mile in diameter
Too many to be planets 100,000+ discovered
Ceres, Pallas, Vesta are the largest 500-mile diameter
Elliptical orbits that could hit Earth!
Theorized that an asteroid DID hit Earth 65 million years ago. . .

6. Asteroid Belt Orbit between Mars and Jupiter
What does this separate? Draw a line between?

7. Meteoroid Meteor Meteorites A chunk of rock or dust in space
Formed by Comets breaking up
Formed by Asteroids colliding
Meteoroid
Meteor
Enters Earth’s Atmosphere
Friction with air causes heat and light
Streaks through the sky
Meteorites
Pass through Earth’s atmosphere
Hit Earth’s surface
Craters on the moon caused by meteorites

8. Answer the question using pictures!

9. Answer the question using pictures!

10. Answer the question using pictures!

11. Match the words.