A comet is a bunch of frozen clumps, gasses, and leftover dust. They are usually a few miles wide. As they get closer and closer to the sun, they get hotter and hotter and eventually get so hot they blast lots of dust and gasses that can be bigger than a planet. The stuff it spews out is usually in the shape of a tail and its length is millions of miles.

Every comet has a small frozen area, which is commonly called the nucleus. Which is usually no bigger than a few kilometers across the comet. Inside the nucleus, it can contain things like frozen gasses, lumps of ice, and dust.

Usually, comets are far away from the sun. Halley’s comet is no less than 89 kilometres away from the sun (55 million miles away). But, there are some comets that are commonly called ‘Sungrazers’ that collide with the sun or get too close to the sun, and as a result, they get broken up into smaller pieces or get evaporated. 

Have you ever wondered what differentiates a planet from a dwarf planet? Did you know that Pluto isn’t the only dwarf planet?

An example of a dwarf planet is, of course, Pluto, but there are others such as Makemake and Ceres. Even then, scientists haven’t discovered all of them yet, because “most of them are very far away”. One trait of a dwarf planet is when a dwarf planet travels, it travels in a rather bumpy fashion, whereas a planet has a clear area to orbit. The reason for this is that before, planets didn't have a clear path; it was bumpy. But over time, after many collisions with asteroids, they have created a clear path for themselves. And of course, the other difference is that planets are quite a bit larger than dwarf planets. 

Though there are differences, planets and dwarf planets do have some things in common: they both have a sufficient amount of gravity and mass to be “nearly round”, and they both orbit around the sun. 

Text citations:

NASA. Space Shorts: What is a Dwarf Planet? https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/edu/learn/video/space-shorts-what-is-a-dwarf-planet/ 

Image citations:

Universe Today. Diagram of the Solar System. 

Have you ever thought beyond the solar system? On the edge of the solar system there is something believed to be a shell around our solar system called the Oort cloud. The Oort cloud is made up of icy objects that could be as big as mountains or bigger! There could be billions or trillions of these objects in the Oort cloud. 

The Oort cloud is the home of comets. Comets fly from the Oort cloud and travel around 150 thousand kilometers around the solar system and back! Even though Voyager 1 is traveling about a million miles a day it will take about 300 years till the spacecraft can enter the inner boundary of the Oort cloud!  It will take around another 30,000 years for it to get to the other side! It is such a long trip that all of the spacecrafts that have been sent to the Oort cloud will lose their power sources centuries before they get to the inner edge. It is not possible for life to be anywhere near it. The Oort cloud was named after Jan Oort who predicted that it was there around 1950. 

https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/solar-system/oort-cloud/overview/

For an object to be called a dwarf planet it needs to be in orbit around a star, this doesn't mean that it’s a smooth sailing road like our planet.  An orbit of a dwarf planet can be very rough and messy, it can have rocks floating in its path , and even asteroids. Just like a planet, dwarf planets need to be of a somewhat spherical shape, but usually they come out in the shape of an egg due to the force of gravity. Here’s a question some people have been asking.. Do dwarf planets have moons? The Answer is yes definitely. Tho seeing the huge moon circle a tiny planet can be pretty intimidating and yes the moon in some cases can be bigger than the planet itself. 

There are currently only five official dwarf planets, Ceres, Pluto, Haumea, Makemake, and Eris. However, there are many other dwarf planet candidates like Gonggong, Orcus, Quaoar, Sedna, and Salacia. You may have recognized these names because for each they name each planet after mythological characters.

If life is possible on other planets, is life possible on dwarf planets? Yes, Life is possible on dwarf planets but if there were life it would most likely be microscopic beings. New research shows that later in the future it is possible to go mining for oxygen and rocket fuel to power rockets to space just from dwarf planets!

So the next time you find out about a new  planet you’ll know if it is really a planet or if it is a dwarf planet

-https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OTSbYjVCzkjS_70Z6lT5jlE3-HGwnAUCvl-xLcwzLuc/edit?usp=sharing

Dwarf planets are similar to planets. However, they have some differences from them too. 

A dwarf planet is a planet that has bumpy rides as it travels because its path is full of other objects like asteroids. It circles the sun just like a regular one, but a regular planet has a clear path around the sun. Most of those impacts happened billions of years ago, so there's not much left over to get in the way. On the other hand there are still a lot of asteroids in the way for dwarf planets. It is also smaller than most planets.

There are lots of dwarf planets in the universe, but right now we have only found five. The closest planet to us so far is Ceres. It is the smallest out of all the dwarf planets we have found and it was also the first dwarf planet to be seen. It is also the only dwarf planet located in the inner solar system. Ceres itself was named after the Roman goddess of corn and harvests by its discoverer, Giuseppe Piazzi, who spotted it with his telescope in 1801. It’s also the first dwarf planet visited by the spacecraft.

 

 The most famous one is Pluto, who used to be a planet, until scientists discovered the Kuiper Belt. It was also named after an 11 year old called Venetia Burney Phair who thought of the name while eating her breakfast!

The second brightest object in the Kuiper Belt is the dwarf planet Makemake. It had an unofficial code name called Easterbunny because it was discovered shortly after Easter.

The largest dwarf planet right now is Eris who has an extremely cold surface. It has a moon called Dysnomia which was named after Eris. Eris used to be called Xena, who was a television warrior. However, they decided to change the name to Eris instead.

The fast spinning dwarf planet Haumea spins a full rotation every four hours. It was the first known Kuiper Belt Object to have rings and is super cold.