Comets for Kids | Learn about where Comets come from and how they are formed!

In this video we learn all about comets for kids. Students will learn where comets come from, how comets are formed, what comets are made of and many other fun and interesting facts about comets. We learn that a comet in the outer parts of the Solar System is too small to be seen from Earth. You can think of a comet as a large snowball filled with or covered by dust, metal, and debris. They have an icy core, covered by a layer of black dust. The center is mainly composed of water and gases, frozen and mixed together with bits of rock and metal. The nickname for a comet can be a “dirty snowball”. When a comet gets closer to the Sun, the ice melts and changes into a gas. Dust particles spread out around the nucleus in a cloud called a coma, and the Sun causes them to glow. The coma of an average comet is sixty thousand miles across, but it is also very thin. Radiation and the solar wind drive the gases of the coma away causing it to form a straight tail. The tail may grow to ninety-million miles in length.