Artist’s animation of a comet

This animation shows an artist’s view of what the surface of the comet might look like.With sizes ranging from a few hundred metres to some kilometers, comets are relatively small rocky and icy objects. The cloud around the comet, its atmosphere or coma, emerges when the comet approaches the Sun in its journey across the Solar System. As the comet heats up, dust and materials from the surface of its nucleus sublimate, forming a sort of very thin atmosphere.