What is the shape of a comet's orbit?
457528
It is not just round or oval. It is elliptical. One side is close to the sun and one side is closer to the Oort Cloud, or Kuiper Belt, or maybe the heliosphere, the end of the sun's influence to the galaxy.
1165999
There are several comets every year that are visible in binoculars or a small telescope. The recent passage of 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann was particularly interesting because the comet broke into pieces. \n\nAbout the only bright comet in a regular, predictable orbit is Halley, and it won't be back for another fifty years. Comets like Hale-Bopp are rare, coming along maybe every twenty years on average. These large bright comets pass through our solar system after getting kicked out of the Oort cloud by some gravitational disturbance.  The Oort cloud is a huge spherical cloud of cometary bodies that surrounds the sun at a distance of about a light year. It is too far away to be observable, so we have no idea when the next big comet will come. Hale-Bopp was discovered twenty months out, so you could get plenty of advance notice. However, other, smaller comets sometimes put on a spectacular display on short notice, if they pass very close to the Earth.\n\nThere are links below to some comet observation sites. You will see that there are always comets around, but most of them are strictly telescopic objects.
731498
The orbitals themselves have no real "shape".  The graphical representations you are looking at are actually density maps of where an electron in that orbital is most likely to be found.\n\nIf you take a look at an "f" orbital, for example, you'll see that the "shape" is not contiguous.  It looks like a hourglass going through a donut.  Electrons being the happy things they are can appear the various different permitted energy levels around a nucleus and can even "tunnel" outside the atom itself.  Just remember when you're looking at those pictures that you're not really looking at shapes but density graphs of where an electron in that type of orbital can most probably be found.
279727
By rotating on it's axis I think you mean how long it takes to spin around, not orbit the sun.  Ths number varies from comet to comet, and it is rather hard to measure.  That said the ones that we have measured tend to have rotational periods of between 3 and 15 hours.
726348
Well, that is one hypothesis, which is "conjecture", which is just to say it's a "great big guess".  No astronomical explanation has thus far been a satisfactory explanation, because the hypotheses fail to explain "why" comets orbit the Sun clockwise, while everything in our Solar System rotates counter-clockwise along with the counter-clockwise rotation of the Sun.\n\nMy analysis has determined that our Solar System and the Sirius Binary System are interlocked in an electromagnetic deadly dance of death in which the two systems cyclically and recurrently interpenetrate through each other every 12,000-year period.  Hence, our Solar System is on a collision course with the Sirian System.  This transversion is an extinction level event that I have identified as the Sirian-Solar Reconvergence.  The Sirian Binary rotates clockwise, thus comets are dislodged debris from the Sirian System captured within our Solar System from each Reconvergent event in which the comets retain their original clockwise rotation due to their immense velocity that cannot be overcome by the rotational influence of our counter-clockwise system. \n\nThe Sirian-Solar Reconvergence also explains all the crater impacting that has scared all the solid-body planets.  As the cosmocataclysm ensues all the debris from the various debris belts in both systems dislodge and rains down mass celestial bombardment on every object in both systems, particularly when the Reconvergence reaches its critical vertex of transversion.\n\nAdditionally, the Sirian Solar Reconvergence would completely explain why the planet Venus spins clockwise and backwards (opposite to the spin of the other planets) while revolving around the Sun counter-clockwise, thus creating the unusual phenomenon of one day being one year, because it completes one revolution in one year.  Clearly this is an indication that Venus was originally a planet torn out of its clockwise orbit in the clockwise Sirian System during one of the Reconvergence, and was captured by our Sun.\n\nThe reason why the two systems are locked in this process is because they were formerly unified as one solar system; our system was originally the Osirian Trinary Stellar System.  Sirius B is our original paternal star, Sirius A was the outer star that orbited the body of the system, our Sun (Sol) was technically Sirius C, originally a binary companion with Sirius B at the core of our former Trinary System, and there were originally a total of eleven planets.  The split occurred because Sirius B after depleting its helium as a Red Giant exploded into a Nebula Discontinuity Event, creating the Local Compression Bubble and precipitating the celestial dynamics that tore the system in half.  The two halves journey off to their greatest distance, and then invert and return to the path around the galactic center that they were originally blown apart from, being the recyclic event of the Sirian-Solar Reconvergence.  This cosmocataclysm wipes all human civilization off the face of the Earth and catapults Mankind back to a State of Neobarbarism to begin the slow and incremental process of re-civilization all over again.  It is also responsible for suddenly laying down the Geological Column and entombing the charred bones of beasts and men into fossilization within the stratification, because the event is so violent, catapulting the Earth out of its orbit and thrusting the oceanic waters out of their basins, overrunning the continents.\n\nAs our Solar System and the Sirian System near ever closer, signs of the next Sirian-Solar Reconvergence are mounting, being the environmental deterioration of the terrestrial environment, increased volcanism on the oceanic floors that is heating up the seas and affecting the climatic temperatures, the melting of Earth’s and Mars’s polar ice caps, new red spot storms on Jupiter, the addition of a third belt to the Van Allen Radiation Belts that surround the Earth, the vio
823944
The basic method is to observe its position over several nights.  The subsequent motion of the comet against the background stars is then fitted to a curve that describes the orbit.  The difficulty with this method is that a elliptical orbit can resemble a parabolic or hyperbolic orbit at certain sections of the orbit.  In the early days of astronomical observations, this closeness made it difficult to determine if a comet was in a closed, periodic orbit or whether it would be on an escape path from the Solar System.
37735
Stars are like our Sun. Not comets at all. Comets are dirty, big snowballs that have no light at all. The twinkling comes from heat radiating from earth which makes the light spectrum shift in different colours. Symbols that represent something doesn't often look like the original. Take the symbol for a heart for example. But it's easy! :) Try to draw a immensly huge boiling, burning piece of gas that throws tons of particles out from it in lightning speed and see if anyone understands what you drew. Now try to make it into a character that you can type on a keyboard :)
427235
Dust particles and ionized gas from the comet.  The dust and gas each form their own distinct tail.
339322
if any object following a straight or whatever path was to be attracted by some other larger body and put into and orbit then thru mathematical equations the orbit will always be elliptical(considering variable decceleration and velocity) that's why there is a doubt that moon was just a passing object that earth caught up..(coz it's orbit is circular and that it perfectly covers up the sun during eclipses....search for anomalies of the moon on google) so the orbit cannot be circular unless u "put" an object specifically into that shaped path...\n\nregards...\npretty rough explaination ..sorry cud not include the equations :)\n\nvivek
1133104
Uhh... it wasn't a comet that hit Saturn's moon and made the rings...\nThe rings came from the creation of our solar system, when the gravity of the dense gas of Saturn pulled some rocks, gas, dust, and ice close to it, but not close enough to fall into its core. Unfortunately, the Sun's infrared rays were not able to hit and melt these rocks, gas, dust, and ice, so they just accumulated and formed rings.
580468
Dark Comets by Shapen
810784
Colloquially, a trajectory is the path in space followed by a body. Such a body can be a projectile, for example. Strictly speaking trajectory refers only to that portion of the path during which the body undergoes a transient movement between practically stationary or repetitive motions or until the body eventually stops moving. In a wider sense it also includes the meaning of orbit - the path of a planet, an asteroid or comet, for example. A trajectory can be described mathematically by the geometry of the path or as the position of the object over time.\nclick here:http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Projectile_motion&redirect=no\nhttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trajectory
661102
It ORBITS round the sun because of the suns gravity. It also SPINS on its axis, similar to earth but much faster. (takes half the time of earth to spin and it is much bigger)
892990
How would we know?\n\nThe orbit of the earth is a plane.  Consider clockwise and counterclockwise rotation.  Btw, those terms come from the way a shadow moves on a sundial.
586535
A continuing effort to identify even near Earth asteroids which are relatively easy to track and have a greater possibility of collision is still incomplete, with only a fraction of their orbits plotted. Since the orbital periods of comets and other Oort cloud entities are in the tens, hundreds, or even thousands of years, many of these objects have never been seen in recorded history, much less their orbits calculated and possibility of collision with Earth evaluated. With this in mind, an event such as this might be possible at any point in the future, although since objects from the outer solar system tend to be rather reflective, chances are that they would be spotted and we would have some advance warning of a likely intersection with Earth orbit presenting a cause for concern. That said, the chance of it happening in any particular year is extremely remote, the likelihood of it happening sometime in the next several million years greater.
217914
A comet far from the sun would look like a small black rock.  There are many small black rocks out in space.  The difference between a comet and a lot of other objects out there is that comets have large amounts of ice in them.\n\nAs the comet nears the sun these ices turn to gas.  The comet now becomes enveloped in a ball of gas.  This ball of gas, or "coma" scatters sunlight, and the comet becomes much brighter.\n\nStill closer the amount of ices turing to gas increase and the comet grows two tails.  One tail is made up of gas that has been ionized from the UV light the sun puts out.  These gas ions are carried away from the comet by the solar wind.  This tail always points away from the sun.\n\nThe second tail that forms is made up of rocks, dust, and other assorted particulate.  They are blown off of the comet by the rapidly expanding gas being produced by melting ice.  Since these are particles, the behave just like any other particle and try to orbit the Sun.  The trail behind the comet in its orbit.
563434
a meteor is headed toward earth so it hits the atmosphere, so you never see it again. the comet orbits the sun, so it does not burn up. the reason it does not burn up when it gets to close to the sun is because it orbits it, it does not crash into it.