According to a news release from the Royal Astronomical Society, astronomers from the University of Anitoquia have found a graveyard of comets. Amazingly, these comets have come back from the dead after millions of years, convincing the astronomers to call them the “Lazarus comets.” The Royal Astronomical Society notes that comets are among the tiniest objects in the Solar System, usually a few kilometers across and constructed of a mixture of rock and ices. If the comets journey close to the Sun, then some of the ices become gas, before being pushed back by the light of the Sun and the solar wind to create a tail of gas and dust. A lot of comets have elliptical orbits, indicating that they almost never journey close to the Sun. In fact, some of these comets spend thousands of year completing each orbit around the Sun. In addition to these so-called long period comets, there are also approximately 500 short period comets, assembled when long period comets travel near Jupiter and are bounced off into orbits that last between 3 and 200 years. Occasionally, comets collide with Earth and may have played a key role in bringing water to our planet. According to the Royal Astronomical Society, astronomers examined a third and well-defined region of the Solar System, the primary belt of asteroids between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. This region holds more than one million objects varying in size from 1 meter to 800 kilometers. Read more: http://www.sciencerecorder.com/news...rs-of-dormancy-astronomers-say/#ixzz2avYCj3cn
