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2 results for “comets”.

• Meteors, Meteorites and Showers: What Actually Falls From the Sky
  Almost every shooting star you have ever seen was a grain of dust from a comet burning up eighty kilometres above you — and the science of what survives the fall is stranger than the fiction. Here is the difference between the three meteor- words, and how to watch a shower properly.
• Comets: How Icy Visitors Build Their Tails, and When You Can See One
  A comet is a snowball the size of a town that grows a tail longer than Earth's orbit on the way to meet the sun. Here is the physics of the two-tailed transformation, where these visitors come from, and how to plan a night around one.