Jason E. Andersen

Things have been busy around here, as we are now working to pack up and move our lives fully to Minnesota. Probably more on that later, after the stress wears off, if such a thing should ever happen. In the meantime, you get another space fun fact. This one is about comets!

I’ve written about comets a couple of times. Comets are big balls of dust and ice that orbit our sun. Generally, the orbits of comets are highly elliptical, diving towards the sun, making a close visit, and then disappearing into the far reaches of our solar system, not to be seen again for hundreds or perhaps thousands of years.

Bonus Fun Fact: There are 3,883 known comets in our solar system. That is a lot! I don’t know how many I was expecting, but it was less. I was looking up something completely different and found this fact on the NASA website. It’s staggering and I wanted to share it with you. The Oort Cloud will have to wait for another day.