• Question: How are comets made?

    Asked by 534gdna37 to David on 12 Nov 2014. This question was also asked by 439gdna37.
    • Photo: David Wilson

      David Wilson answered on 12 Nov 2014:

      Well we’re about to find out what they’re made of, as we just landed on one for the first time. Comets are left over lumps of stuff from the disc of dust and gas that formed the planets. This means that they’ve never been part of a planets and are pretty much unchanged from the birth of the Solar System. So by studying them we can know what the solar system was like at the very beginning.
      They also have lots of water, and we think that all of the water on Earth was delivered here by comets hitting us.

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