I've been hard at work in recent months on an infographic that details the anatomy of a comet... I'm a graphic designer and this is a fun little side-project of mine. It's only quite basic in terms of information (it's the design itself that I've been slaving over).
Astronomy is something I've always found pretty fascinating (hence me deciding to work on this project) but I'm far from an expert. So I thought I'd post the content of my infographic on here just to check I've got the right idea, and not got anything drastically wrong! The content that I've come up with is based on my own research that I've done online.
If anyone could let me know what they think that'd be much appreciated:
01/ Nucleus — Sometimes referred to as a ‘dirty snowball’, the nucleus
is the centre of a comet—made up of rock, dust, and frozen gases. As
the comet gets closer to the sun, these gases sublimate and form the
‘coma’ around the comet.
02/ Coma — The high-energy particles from the solar wind interact with
the ice and dust from the comet’s nucleus, resulting in a fuzzy
appearance known as a coma. A coma will form a cloud around the comet
and will typically grow in size as the comet approaches the sun.
03/ Ion Tail — A bright tail composed of ionised gas molecules. The ion
tail is pushed by the solar wind, resulting in it being straight and
always and pointing directly away from the sun. Like dust tails, ion
tails can also be very large with the longest recorded being over 570
million kilometres.
04/ Dust Tail — A tail composed mainly of dust particles, released from
the nucleus as the ices are vaporised by the sun. The dust tail curves
around the orbital path of the comet and can extend hundreds of
millions of kilometres in length.
Does that all sounds about right? I'm a little confused about the lengths of the tails, not sure if that world record is strictly for an ion tail or a dust tail? or both?
And incase you're wondering what the infographic looks like... here it is!
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