What are comets mainly made of? Solar system. Comets. Heavenly Wanderers

A few days ago, the area of ​​the comet where Rosetta will descend became known. This is Maat, in the smallest lobe of the two, consisting of a comet where some active regions are observed. Seriously, the Sun is a star that shines with its own light and was formed about 5 billion years ago and will continue to live for probably another 5 billion years.

The distance of the Sun from the Earth is about 150 million kilometers and is considered an astronomical unit. The distance of the Sun from other stars is measured in light years. A light year is the distance traveled by a ray of light per year traveling at about a thousand times the speed of the Earth. It is made up of 75 percent hydrogen, 20 percent helium and traces of other elements such as oxygen, carbon and nitrogen.

Such high values ​​depend on the enormous amount of heat generated by the nuclear fusion process occurring inside the Sun. In this process, four hydrogen nuclei fuse to form a helium nucleus. During nuclear fusion, a small amount of a substance produces great amount energy. Nuclear reactions occur in the central region of the Sun, called the core.

Energy is transferred by irradiation and conditionally from the center to the surface. The surface of the Sun is called the photosphere and emits visible radiation, or radiation that can be seen as bright. The photosphere often exhibits darker areas caused by lower temperature gas vortices called sunburns.

A thin, colored layer called the chromosphere marks the boundary between the photosphere and the corona. The corona is the outermost region of the solar atmosphere, visible only during eclipses. At this point the Sun is at what should be its maximum, although it appears quite calm.

Comets are composed of gas masses mixed with dust, ice and fragments stone material. Comets are believed to originate from regions of the solar system far beyond Pluto, where a cloud formed from billions of protocomets would be located.

Protocoms are nuclei consisting of solid particles, which, after penetrating into the Solar System and approaching the Sun, undergo partial evaporation under the influence of solar energy. More specifically, as the protometer approaches the Sun, some of the frozen material from which it is formed evaporates, forming a gaseous cloud called a hair and tail. The comet then forms a head, formed in turn by a nucleus, surrounded by hair and a tail, which always turns on the opposite side of the Sun.

Comets orbit the Sun in very elongated elliptical orbits and can be seen from Earth at controlled intervals. When a comet's orbit is relatively short, it appears after short intervals; if instead it is very long, the comet takes many years before passing through the inner solar system. It may happen that a comet, having presented itself at regular intervals, disappears and no longer appears for a ritual purpose.

The disappearance may be due to the fact that it escaped the sun's gravity and is lost in interstellar space, or that, passing too close to the Sun, it simply disintegrated. According to many theories, comets contributed to the formation of water on our planet.

Additional information about stars. The star comes from a cloud of gas and cosmic dust that takes its name as a nebula. Mana, that particles of the cloud matter attract each other, forming more and more masses, the temperature of the nebula rises, and the star begins to glow.

When the temperature reaches approximately 10 million degrees Celsius in the stellar core, nuclear fusion occurs, creating a huge amount of energy that reaches the surface of the star and is radiated into space. A star's life depends on its size. When a small or medium-sized star runs out of hydrogen present in its core, it undergoes rapid contraction accompanied by a rise in temperature. The heat that is heated warms the surrounding gases, causing the formation of helium.

A star at this stage is called a giant or supergiant star and is at the end of its existence. A white dwarf is nothing more than the dying core of a giant star, so called by astronomers for the faint white light it emits. When a white dwarf has exhausted all its energy, it turns into a black dwarf. It may happen that in an area of ​​the sky where a star has never been observed, it may suddenly appear very bright, which disappears after a certain period of time.

A star of this type is called a nova. According to astronomers, the nova is the product of a violent stellar explosion, during which the material that forms the outer layer of the star is dispersed into space. After the explosion, the remaining gas, once cooled, wraps around what is left of the star, forming a nebula visible to telescopes for many years.

However, not all stars become white dwarfs. In fact, if the star's mass is large enough, the star can explode, leaving behind a cloud of gas and forming a neutron star. In a neutron star, matter is so compressed that it has a density of a billion tons per cubic centimeter. Therefore, its mass can be no more than two to three times higher than that of the Sun and its gravity and 100 billion times higher than that of the Earth.

When you have a supernova, you can also form a pulsar, which is a neutron star that spins rapidly on its axis. These stars emit radio waves that allow astronomers to determine their rotation speed using telescopic radio receivers.

If the process of contraction of a neutron star or pulsar, such a gravitational collapse, never stops, the star can be reduced to a single point. These points are called black holes. In a black hole, the material is so compacted that the force of gravity is so strong that it cannot escape the light either. Black holes are therefore invisible. Thanks to new technologies, astronomers have now identified a large number of black holes.

Comets, those lonely vagabonds of space, attracted to the Sun like butterflies of night lights, were born at the same time as our solar system about four and a half billion years ago, but, unlike the planets, the ancient ice and dust of comets have remained motionless since then .

So there are windows to the past through which we can look at when it all began. Comets are associated with our history and our legends, and have been feared for centuries because they were guilty of bad luck and unbelief. Their passage was met with superstitious concern, but while many feared these mysterious strings of light that moved across the night sky, others, not blinded by superstition, considered them part of the nature they were trying to understand.

Among them is the English astronomer Edmund Halley. For this prediction, Halley laughed, but a subsequent passage of the comet confirmed his intuition. The largest comets were then intensively studied by scientists. Comets are a very mysterious small body in the solar system that mostly move along elliptical curves. They are actually "dirty ice balls". They come from rocks, dust and dirt that contain water ice and frozen gases. The name of these pseudosciences comes from the Hebrew word for "comets" or long-haired.

In Czech sources the name “hairy” appears most often. Observation of comets From the beginning to the present, comets have already been considered the bearer of life and death. Perhaps this is the reason for life and perhaps the end different years on the ground. These small bodies are considered to be the objects of origin of the solar system. They were certainly observed in our prehistoric times, and the oldest records of their injections can be found in archival documents from the East. The oldest document is from internal sources from 240 BC. This discovery was Halley's Comet.

But hundreds of scientists believed that these were just “exhausts” in the Earth’s atmosphere. By the end of the century, a total of 150 comets had been recorded, but there were repeated recoils on a number of occasions cometary comets. Over the centuries, the most successful comet hunter, Jean-Louis Pons, discovered 37 comets. Johann Enck helped Laplace's theory identify the comet with the shortest period of 3.3 years. Named after Enck, which did not belong to the discoverers. This was the first time a comet was associated with meteor shower, which later managed to prove a majority for all large meteor swarms.

This team's discovery contributed significantly to the understanding of the physics of comets. The capture of the photographs was a result of the upcoming discovery and better understanding of the morphology of comets. Regardless of this, Gerard Kuiper came up with the idea of ​​a cometary disk beyond the outer edge of a planetary system.

This verse with a giant planet shows that our planet can pose a threat to our comets. Parts of this comet created Earth-sized crumbs on Jupiter that would have catastrophic consequences for our planet. Although Jupiter acts as a "planetary vacuum" in our system, sometimes a comet breaks up and lands on Earth. Many scientists agree that comets are more dangerous to us than asteroids. The reason is the late observation of comets. They are visible until they approach the Sun to begin releasing gases.

In the future he is considering sending spacecraft to become cometary satellites or take samples of cometary rock. Documentary: Vesmer - a trip to the comet. Description of the comet This is a very dark body that reflects 3 to 4% of the light. A comet consists of a nucleus, a coma, and a ponytail. The nucleus is the solid part of the comet that is likely to be produced during gravitational impacts from icy planes at the edge of the system. The comet's nucleus is essentially permanent until it approaches the Sun, causing gravitational destruction.