Meteors and Meteorites
So meteors and meteorites are basically the same thing. For basic description meteors are floating pieces of rock or other material broken off from a comet or an asteroid that floats into the earth’s or any other planet’s atmosphere. When a meteor enters the atmosphere it burns down on a huge scale. Though they are just rock they are beautiful to see coming to the earth, since our atmosphere is so hot the rock starts to burn away to us it looks like a streak of light that is known as a shooting star while up close tons of heat is formed as the piece of rock struggles to hit the earth scientists believe this is why the earth has survived for so long unlike the other planets. Most of the time over half the meteors that go into our atmosphere do not survive the trip down. For example if a meteor were as big as your house it would come down the size of your hand. A meteorite is simply a meteor that has made contact with the earth. I know this sounds like a very basic definition that is all a meteorite really is.
Comets
Comets are generally pieces of ice and dust collected over time. Alone they are hard to see but when they come close to the sun they develop a tail called a coma. A coma is formed by the effect of the sun’s radiation and heat on the comet, the ice and dust particles accumulate at the center of the comet and while the comet moves the particles are left behind which looks like a tail from our point of view. Their comet's coma can be up to thousands of miles long. They are usually found in two places: the Oort cloud which is several million years away and the Kuiper belt found in our solar system. The reason comets can be seen by the naked eye is due to sunlight reflecting and refracting off the dust in the tail. Comets actually have 2 tails one caused by the dust and ice (this is usually broad and curved) and the ion or plasma tail, this one is caused by the gasses built up inside the comet reacting to the sun’s radiation.
Stars
Stars are massive celestial bodies of gas that shine with radiation from its inside energy sources. Somewhat related to star clusters are stellar associations, which consist of loose groups of physically similar stars that have insufficient mass as a group to remain together as an organization. There are three types of sizes: (these are categorized based on their size in comparison to our sun) Dwarf stars are stars smaller than our sun examples are Altair, Alpha Centauri A and B, Sirius A, and Vega the last two on this list are brighter than our sun but still a dwarf star, next is stars are giant stars like Aldebaran A, Arcturus, and Capella A these stars have dimensions far greater than that of our sun, Betelgeuse and Antares A are examples of supergiant stars with radii measuring over 300 times that of our sun. Stars come in various different colors such as white, blue, and red but here blue is the most hot star and red is the least hot star.
dwarf planets
Before august 2006, we had 9 planets and that ninth planet was pluto. If you go to the “our solar system” page and scroll to the bottom, you will learn more about pluto there. Dwarf planets are planets that are sphere shaped, revolve around the sun, and lack gravitational force used to pull all material found in its orbit. For a planet to be a planet, there are rules. The rules are that it orbits the sun, it is sphere shaped, and it clears the neighborhood. Clearing the neighborhood means it has no other nearby objects in its path, with the exception of its satellites, which are its moons. Dwarf planets are way smaller than any of our giant 8 planets, because most dwarf planets are just the size of earth’s moon and even smaller. If the scientists were going to name all the dwarf planets to real planets, there would be over 100s of dwarf planets.
