The Solar System contains many objects other than the sun and the eight planets. Things such as comets and asteroids are in constant motion throughout it as well.
Comets are giant clumps of ice between one kilometer and ten kilometers in diameter. These objects are affected directly by the sun when they come close to it. A corona forms around the ice nucleus, growing to the size of Jupiter.
As it gets closer, the solar wind pulls the corona away from the sun, causing a tail. Comets have two tails: an ion tail (blue colored) that is made of carbon monoxide and directly affect by the solar wind, and a dust tail (yellow colored) that is made up of dust and is affected by both the solar wind and sunlight.
Comets can be grouped in different ways. One way is by their orbital period. Short length comets take less than two hundred years to complete their orbits and are almost always prograde (moving in a counter-clockwise direction around the sun). Long length comets take over two hundred years to complete their orbit and are about half and half between prograde and retrograde.
All of their orbits are ellipses. They can come from either the Kuiper Belt (located past Neptune) or the Oort Cloud (located much further past the Kuiper Belt).
Another type of object in the solar system is the asteroid. These are dark, small, irregular shaped space rocks. Some contain silicon and their cores are easily molded into various shapes due to pressure. These are hard to see due to their albedo level. They are dark and don’t easily reflect sun. These objects mainly have an orbit between Mars and Jupiter.
There more objects found in the solar system and beyond. These are the most commonly talked about.
