WHY DO COMETS TAILS POINT TO OR AWAY FROM THE SUN?

molecules. The tail is formed when the sun's radiation vaporizes some of the material on the coma. The material that spurts from the coma forms the tail. Some of the gases that make up the coma and tail are: hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and oxygen. Although they are only gases, the coma can be larger than the planet Jupiter and the tail, millions of miles long. The solar wind (charged particles blow off of the sun's surface by its magnetic field) actually "blows" against the comet; as the comet gets closer to the sun and its surface starts to evapourate (comets are basically dirty icecubes), the solar wind pushes these evapourated particles away from the sun. To elaborate further: A comet is made up of many tiny dust particles covered with ice that stuck together when the Solar System was forming. The comets reside in either the Kuiper Belt, just outside the orbit of Neptune, or the Oort Cloud, which is a spherical distribution of comets as far as 100,000 AU away (an AU is an Astronomical Unit which is equal to the distance between the Earth and the Sun). At these distances, it is very cold and comets do not release any gases. As a comet approaches the Sun, the ices warm until they reach the temperature at which they evaporate (Note: the ices do not melt because the pressure is too low. They go directly from the solid ice to a gas). When this happens, not only the gas, but the dust is also removed from the comet because the particles are only loosely held together.

An analogy to explain: If you stand in a wind tunnel facing into the wind, your hair ( imagine you have long hair) will be blown behind you. As you walk toward the fan, your hair will continue to be blown behind you. If you turn around, your hair is now blowing in front of you, but still away from the fan. Even if you walk away, your hair will be blowing in front of you because the force of the wind is strong enough to push your hair forward. Your hair does not change direction even though you do. The solar wind plays the same role in space as the wind in the tunnel and hair represents the comet tail. There are two types of comet tails: dust and gas ion. A dust tail contains small, solid particles that are about the same size found in cigarette smoke. This tail forms because sunlight pushes on these small particles, gently shoving them away from the comets nucleus. Because the pressure from sunlight is relatively weak, the dust particles end up forming a diffuse, curved tail. A gas ion tail forms when ultraviolet sunlight rips one or more electrons from gas atoms in the coma, making them into ions (a process called ionization). The solar wind then carries these ions straight outward away from the Sun. The resulting tail is straighter and narrower. Both types of tails may extend millions of kilometers into space. As a comet heads away from the Sun, its tail dissipates, its coma disappears, and the matter contained in its nucleus freezes into a rock-like material.

EXPLAIN WHY THE MEMBERS OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM GENERALLY DO NOT BOMB ONE ANOTHER AS THEY TRAVEL IN SPACE.
Introduction Stars are born. They take shape. They go through a turbulent adolescence, and then they live out their lives in a predictable pattern. Some have companions to provide for. Others rapidly decline and die. In some ways, stars are just like people.

This is where the Sun comes in. The Sun has Comets are found in two main regions of the solar system: the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud. There are two types of comets: short-period comets and longperiod comets.Comets are celestial objects that streak across the heavens with long tails of shimmering light that can be seen at night and at times during the day. The comas and tails of comets are made mostly of gases which are fragmentary what is known as the solar wind -- a low density stream of charged particles, mostly protons and electrons, that travel outward at 450 km/s (or about 2,600,000 miles per hour). These particles hit the gas and dust released by a comet and push them outward. Gas molecules are very light so the solar wind pushes them straight away from the Sun to form the ion tail. The dust particles are massive compared to the gas but the solar wind also pushes them away to form the dust tail, which is curved but still points away from the Sun. Even when the comet is moving away from the Sun, the solar wind is still pushing the dust outward so the tail is still pointing away from the Sun.

Our star, the Sun, is no exception. Once, people regarded it as a different sort of object than the stars. It ruled the day; stars adorned the night. But over the past few centuries astronomers have com to recognise that it is just one middle-aged member of the vast family of stars. From far away, the Sun

would look just like any other star - a point of light. Like any other star it is mortal.

new theory of relativity showed that matter can be converted into energy (E=mc2).

The realisation that the Sun is a star has done wonders for astronomy. By studying it, the closest star, scientists have learned about all stars. Conversely, by studying the stars, in all their variety we have learned about the past and future of our Sun.

At first glance, these three ideas might seem totally unrelated. But from them, they deduced that the Sun's energy source was a process then unknown on Earth: the nuclear fusion of hydrogen to helium. Deep in the Sun's hot and dense core hydrogen atoms are squeezed together or fused, into helium atoms. A helium atom has less mass than the

Staying Alive The importance of the Sun to the Earth is one of the main reasons scientists want to understand it. In fact, the impetus for solar science early this century came not from astronomers, but from geologists. At the beginning of this century, they believed that the oldest rocks on the Earth are about 4 billion years old and that the Sun was 4.5 - 5 billion years old. The extreme age came as a surprise. They soon realised that known energy sources could only have kept the Sun alive for 20 million years. Other sources of energy - say, a huge fire - would burn out even quicker. The solution to this age discrepancy was the result of several disparate advances in science.

hydrogen energy from which it was created and this missing mass turns into energy. Few other methods can generate as much energy as nuclear fusion. A small amount of hydrogen can produce an immense amount of energy - which is why nuclear bombs are so destructive, and why the Sun can keep shining for billions of years.

We are family How did the Sun become hot and dense to begin with? This is the secret ofstellar birth. Though we weren't around to witness the birth of our provider, we can read its early life history in the stars. Specifically, we can look out into space and see new stars being born right now.

First, astronomers knew that the Sun has to be extremely hot and dense in its centre if it is to support its own weight. Gas at a high temperature exerts a strong pressure, and this holds up the Sun's outer layers. Second, physicists had recently compared the weight of four atoms of hydrogen with that of one helium atom. Both the hydrogen quadruplet and the helium are composed of essentially the same number of subatomic particles. Yet the helium weighs less. Third, Albert Einstein's The closest example is the Great Nebula in Orion, a pattern of bright stars easily visible to the naked eye. This is a stellar nursery - an enormous, lumpy cloud of cold gas and dust, which turns into hundreds of new blue baby stars. The gas is mostly hydrogen and the dust is something like the dust in a desert storm. Within the clouds are hundreds of condensed, cold lumps of gas and dust. A disturbance, such as a blast wave from a nearby stellar explosion, can cause each lump to begin

collapsing under its own weight. When the temperature in the core reached several million degrees, the hydrogen atoms started to fuse together, more energy was released, and so on. A chain reaction started that will go on for billions of years. The outward pressure created by this nuclear fusion counterbalanced the inward pressure of gravity, and when the two cancelled each other out, the lump of dust and gas stopped collapsing. The Sun was born. We can see many examples of such star-forming regions. About two thirds of stars are actually born with nearby twins, but the Sun is alone.

only slight. They also estimate it has another 5 billion years to go.

What will happen when the Sun has burnt up all the gas? Fortunately, it will still have reserves of hydrogen in the layers that surround the core. The core will heat up this shell of hydrogen. When the shell gets hot enough to fuse hydrogen to helium, the release of energy will carry on there. But this trick has its price. The source of energy will no longer be the dense, massive core, but rather a shell closer to the surface - and that will make a big (so to speak) difference on the structure of the Sun. It will puff up until its radius is 30 times greater becoming

Perfect Depending on the size of the original lump of gas and dust, the process of stellar birth can give rise to different sorts of stars. A small lump never develops high enough pressures and temperatures to start nuclear fusion. It is doomed to remain a dark, dismal stellar failure - a brown dwarf star. A larger lump becomes a large star, so hot and bright that it burns itself out in a few tens of millions of years. A middle-sized lump, not too small and not too large, becomes a middling star such as the Sun. Which is good: if the Sun had been much smaller, Earth would have been a dark, dead world; much larger and the Earth would have been broiled. Lucky for us, it's the perfect size to sustain life on Earth. In its early years, it went through a tempestuous youth, whipping up strong winds that cleared the solar system of what ever gas had not been incorporated into a planet. But then it settled down. From studying rocks, fossils, and Antarctic ice, scientists think the Sun has been brightening over time, but

a red giant, similar to the star Arcturus, though much smaller than a supergiant such as Betelguese in the constellation Orion. A red giant is red because its exterior cooled from 9,000 to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit as it expanded; for a star, red means cool. This red giant stage will last for about 2 billion years.

Smaller New data from the European Space Agency's Hipparcos satellite has led experts to scale back their estimates of the size of red stars. They now think that the Sun will not engulf us when it becomes a red giant, as previously believed. But this will be small comfort. In its retirement from normal core fusion, our previously nurturing star will care little for its planetary children. It will be pumping out a thousand times more energy, making Earth a good approximation to hell. To add insult to injury, the solar wind (a stream of particles which now gives us fun things like the Northern Lights) will become a cyclone that will make radio

communication impossible and perhaps evaporate the atmosphere altogether. Looking on the bright side, the red giant Sun may be warm enough to melt the water rich, but now frozen moons of Jupiter and Saturn. Humanity, if it is still around, might relocate there.

gravitational clutches of the core, will waft away. Over the course of about 10,000 years, these layers will spread out into space as an enormous sphere of gas lit up by the now naked hot core. These layers constitute a 'planetary nebula', so called because in a small telescope the gas cloud looks a bit like the disc of a planet. The hot core is now a 'white dwarf',

Meanwhile, what happens to all that helium being produced in the shell? It gently rains onto the dead, but still hot, core of the Sun, making it more massive and more compressed. This raises the temperature of the core until suddenly - and I really do mean suddenly, as in seconds - the helium in the core fires up and begins to fuse itself into carbon.

a stellar cinder. As a white dwarf, the ex-Sun will glow white-hot for near eternity.

Alas, there will be no dramatic explosions to entertain our distant descendants: the Sun, modest in life, is subdued in death. After the planetary nebula fades, there is no nuclear fusion at all, just a lump of hot soot and some happy memories. The

The End is Nigh (only 5 billion years to go)! The end is drawing near. Now the Sun has to rearrange its internal structure all over again, as its source of energy is once again the central core. It will contract back to a bit larger than its original radius and will give off ten times as what we are used to now. This phase only lasts another 500 million years, as there are a lot fewer helium nuclei (it took four hydrogen nuclei to make one helium nucleus, and three helium nuclei to make up one carbon nucleus) and the energy production is much less efficient.

Sun will well and truly be dead.

The Next Generation? The Sphere of gas drifts off and eventually is gathered up in a new cloud, and become part of the next generation of star fomation. Maybe one day the ashes of the Sun will throw their lot in with another star to be born, live, die, and, perhaps give sustenance to other warm little planets. Or maybe not.

THE SUN

The Sun is the star at the center of

As it exhausts the helium in the core, the Sun desperately staves off the inevitable by resorting again to those reserves in its outer layers. Again it expands. This time it grows so large that its outer edge is only weakly gravitationally bound to the core, barely holding itself together anymore. After another 100 million years, things will really start

the Solar System. It is almost perfectly sphericaland consists of hot plasma interwoven with magnetic [10][11] fields. It has a diameter of about 1,392,000 km, about 109 times that of Earth, and its mass (about 30 210 kilograms, 330,000 times that of Earth) accounts for about 99.86% of the total mass of the Solar [12] System. Chemically, about three quarters of the Sun's mass consists ofhydrogen, while the rest is mostly helium. The remainder (1.69%, which nonetheless equals 5,628 times the mass of Earth) consists of heavier elements, [13] including oxygen,carbon, neon, iron, and others.

The Sun's stellar classification, based on spectral class, falling apart. The Sun's outer layers, freed from the is G2V, and is informally designated as a yellow dwarf,

because its visible radiation is most intense in the yellow-green portion of the spectrum and although its color is white, from the surface of the Earth it may appear yellow because of atmospheric scattering of blue light.
[14][15]

Since our galaxy is moving with respect to the cosmic microwave background radiation (CMB) in the direction of the constellation Hydra with a speed of 550 km/s, the Sun's resultant velocity with respect to the CMB is about 370 km/s in the direction of Crater or Leo.
[23]

In the spectral class label, G2 indicates

its surface temperature of approximately 5778 K (5505 C), and V indicates that the Sun, like most stars, is a main-sequence star, and thus generates its energy by nuclear fusion of hydrogen nuclei into helium. In its core, the Sun fuses 620 million metric tons of hydrogen each second. Once regarded by astronomers as a small and relatively insignificant star, the Sun is now thought to be brighter than about 85% of the stars in the Milky Way galaxy, most of which are red dwarfs.
[16][17]

The mean distance of the Sun from the Earth is approximately 149.6 million kilometers (1 AU), though the distance varies as the Earth moves from perihelion in January toaphelion in July.
[24]

At this

average distance, light travels from the Sun to Earth in about 8 minutes and 19 seconds. The energy of this sunlight supports almost all life on Earth by photosynthesis,
[25]

and drives

Earth's climate and weather. The enormous effect of the Sun on the Earth has been recognized since prehistoric times, and the Sun has been regarded by some cultures as a deity. An accurate scientific understanding of the Sun developed slowly, and as recently as the 19th century prominent scientists had little knowledge of the Sun's physical composition and source of energy. This understanding is still developing; there are a number of present-day anomalies in the Sun's behavior that remain unexplained.

The absolute magnitude of the Sun is +4.83;

however, as the star closest to Earth, the Sun is the brightest object in the sky with an apparent magnitude of 26.74.
[18][19]

The Sun's

hot corona continuously expands in space creating the solar wind, a stream of charged particles that extends to the heliopause at roughly 100astronomical units. The bubble in the interstellar medium formed by the solar wind, theheliosphere, is the largest continuous structure in the Solar System.
[20][21]

WHY IS THE SUN

a star. It is a huge ball of hot gases undergoing constant nuclear reactions, and releasing gigantic amounts of light, heat and various particles.

The Sun is currently traveling through the Local Interstellar Cloud in the Local Bubblezone, within the inner rim of the Orion Arm of the Milky Way galaxy. Of the 50 nearest stellar systems within 17 light-years from Earth (the closest being a red dwarf namedProxima Centauri at approximately 4.2 light years away), the Sun ranks fourth in mass.
[22]

The Sun orbits the center of the

Milky Way at a distance of approximately24,000 26,000 light years from the galactic center, completing one clockwise orbit, as viewed from the galactic north pole, in about 225250 million years.