Question:
Do you know the reletive sizes between moons, comets and asteroids?
anonymous
1970-01-01 00:00:00 UTC
Do you know the reletive sizes between moons, comets and asteroids?
Three answers:
Steve S
2007-07-16 21:05:13 UTC
Size has really nothing to do with these classifications. Is your science teacher an english teacher doing summer school penance?
varithus
2007-07-16 19:47:46 UTC
Is that the actual question, because it is terribly phrased? All three classes of objects can range from a few hundred meters to thousands of kilometers in radius?
nick s
2007-07-16 12:57:54 UTC
That’s quite an ask.



Basically moons range from 4000 miles wide for Jupiter’s largest moon, Ganymede, down to just a few miles wide for Mars moons and plenty of Saturn’s and Jupiter’s smaller moons.



It is probably the case that many of the smaller moons in the Solar System are captured asteroids.



Asteroids range from 900 miles for the largest, Ceres, which is in the main asteroid belt, down to just meters across, at which stage you could call them meteoroids. I haven’t seen a cutoff, but a 50 meter asteroid is often called a 50 meter meteoroid.



The asteroids that orbit the sun outside of the main asteroid belt are generally small – a few miles down to rock size.



Comets are made up of ices, rocks and and dust. They look huge because when they approach the sun, the sun’s radiation makes all the ices and gases volatile. So, a comet halo has sometimes been as big as the sun (nearly million miles acrosss), and a tail stretching 100 million miles. However, the cometary material may only be 10 miles wide or less inside this halo of volatile material.



Comets come from beyond the planetary system, and get captured by the sun into an orbit inside the planetary system. Then after perhaps hundreds of orbits the sun may have driven off all their fluids and gases, and you are left with basically a bunch of asteroids and meteoroids, though it this is not the only way that asteroids and meteoroids are created.



Lastly, comets leave in their wake lots of debris – meteoric dust. These give us the periodic meteor showers, when the Earth passes through a cloud of the debris.



Hope that is enough.


This content was originally posted on Y! Answers, a Q&A website that shut down in 2021.
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