Solar System Debris

meteor

a sudden streak of light in the night sky caused by friction between air molecules in Earth's atmosphere and an incoming piece of interplanetary matter

meteorite

any piece of interplanetary debris that survives its fiery passage through our atmosphere and finds its way to the ground

earth-crossing asteroids

asteroids with eccentricities greater than .4, their paths intersect earths orbit, leading to possible collisions

oort cloud

region which may contain trillions of comets, far beyond orbit of pluto

asteroids

relatively small, predominately rocky objects that revolve around the sun

comets

same thing as a meteoroid, brightens and develops a tail as it nears sun on highly elliptical orbit

ion tail

tail which is straight and made up of glowing, linear streamers

Kuiper belt objects

the collection of faint objects which are relatively nearby the Kuiper belt

micrometeoroids

the small meteoroids which make up meteoroid swarms

tail

when a comet nears the sun this forms and gets smaller and dimmer the farther out the comet is

meteoroid swarm

when a comet passes near the sun and some cometary fragments are dislodged from the main body and travel in a tightly knit group of dust or pebble sized objects

meteor shower

when earths orbit intersects the orbit of a cluster of meteoroids the remains of broken up comets ex Trojan perseids Leonids tauroids

coma

when part of a comet becomes gaseous and expands into space and forms a diffuse "halo" of dust and evaporated gas around the nucleus

asteroid belt

where the vast majority of asteroids are found, midway between orbits of Mars and Jupiter

dwarf planets

a body which 1) orbits the sun 2) is massive enough that it's own Gravity has caused it's shape to be approximately spherical but has not 3) "cleared the neighborhood" around its orbit of other bodies

dust tail

broad, diffuse, and gently curved tail

Trojan asteroids

class of asteroids which orbits at the distance of Jupiter and have 1:1 orbital resonance with Jupiter

Kuiper belt

in the orbit of Neptune, composed of asteroids a little like those in the inner solar system. most comets here move in roughly circular orbits but never venturing into the orbits of the land planets

meteoroids

interplanetary matter (aka asteroid or comet)

hydrogen envelope

invisible, usually distorted by the solar wind, stretches across millions of km of space