Comets are so legendary through songs and folklore that its hard not to like them.
And then theres Halleys comet and Hale Bopp and they start to become a part of pop culture.

They are basically nebulous celestial bodies that orbit the sun. When we see its luminous tail, its only the segment of it that is passing closest to the sun. It is a smal, sharp nucleus embedded in a nebulous disc which is called a coma. One famous astronomer said that the nucleus which contains practically all of the mass of the comet is most likely a type of dirty snowball. A conglomerate of ices and dust. It is the escaping gases that produce the jet like action the comet takes. Comets, when observed over many revolutions tend to fade very slowly. The head of a comet may exceed the size of the planet Jupiter, and it is thought that the blackened Halleys comet is probably about nine miles by two and a half miles. When a comet approaches the sun, its dust surface gets hotter and hotter and the ice on the surface begins to sublimate. The tail is the vaporizing gases coming from the object. When a comet gets nearer to the sun it can develop two tails. Most scientists think that comet originated in the colder, outer portion of space and were residual matter from the early days of the solar system. Generally, it is thought that there are two kinds - short period comets which have periods of less than two hundred years and long period ones with lives of more than two hundred years.

Comets have a most mystical aspect about them and have always been thought of as superstitious omens of calamity or an important event. They also give rise to fears about collisions between them and the earth. Scientists do believe that this is an extremely rare probability but it certainly does make for good movie theories. They do believe that there probably were collisions in the distant past however.

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