comet
part of speech
noun (a comet, comets)
meaning for a pupil
A comet is a ball of ice, dust and rock that travels around the Sun. When it comes close to the Sun, it heats up and makes a glowing cloud and a long bright tail that we can sometimes see in the night sky. tree →
sense in the lessons
In science lessons on space, comets come from the cold outer parts of the solar system; their tail always points away from the Sun because of the solar wind. Halley's Comet comes back about every 76 years. Comets are different from meteors (shooting stars), which are tiny rocks burning up in our air, and asteroids, which are rocky. Phrases: «a comet's tail», «Halley's Comet», «comet sighting».
examples
- A comet has a long glowing tail. tree →
- Halley's Comet comes near Earth about every 76 years. tree →
- The comet's tail points away from the Sun. tree →
- We saw a comet through binoculars. tree →
- Comets are made of ice, dust and rock. tree →
- A comet is sometimes called a «dirty snowball». tree →
- The comet will not be back for many years. tree →
- Scientists landed a probe on a comet. tree →
note
Countable. Myth: comets do not zoom across the sky like shooting stars — they move slowly and can be seen for days or weeks. Maths: if Halley's Comet returns every 76 years, a person usually sees it at most once or twice in a lifetime.
In the corpora
- The Moon is covered in craters, some hundreds of kilometres wide, made by asteroids and comets hitting it.
- Jupiter's gravity flings many comets and asteroids around, sometimes away from the inner planets and sometimes towards them.
- In 1994 pieces of the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 crashed into Jupiter, leaving dark scars bigger than the Earth.
- A comet can have two tails, a curved dust tail and a straight blue gas tail, and both point away from the Sun.
- Halley's Comet returns about every 76 years; it last came in 1986 and will next be bright in 2061.
Trees and pragmatics
Every meaning and example of «comet» parsed by Mova, each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.