What is the sequence from the start to the end of the small comet?

1. Expelled from the solar system

If a comet moves fast enough, it can leave the solar system; this is a hyperbolic comet. So far, the comets known to pop out of the solar system have all interacted with other objects in the solar system, such as Jupiter (see perturbation). All known comets originate within the solar system rather than entering the solar system on hyperbolic orbits at high speeds.

2. Exhaustion of volatile matter

Jupiter family comets (JFC) and long-period comets (LPC, see "Orbital Properties" above) seem to follow very different decay laws. The activity of Jupiter family comets is about 10,000 years, or 1,000 revolutions, while long-period comets disappear even faster.

Only 10% of long-period comets can survive the short perihelion passage 50 times, and only 1% can survive more than 2,000 times. Eventually, most of the comet's volatile materials evaporate, leaving the comet as a small, dark, inert rock or asteroid-like debris.

3. Disintegration (splitting)

Comets will also break into pieces. For example: Comet Biela (3D/Biela) split in 1846, and the comet nucleus completely separated in 1872 , resulting in very spectacular meteor storms in 1872, 1885, and 1892, with the number of meteors per hour reaching about 3,000 to 15,000.

73P/Schwassmann–Wachmann This phenomenon also began to occur in 1995.

These breakups may be caused by tidal forces caused by the gravity of the sun or large planets, by "explosions" of volatile materials, or by other reasons that are not fully understood.

4. Missing

Many comets discovered decades ago or centuries ago have now become missing. Either they have unclear trajectories and their future appearance is difficult to predict, or they have already disintegrated. However, occasionally a "new" comet is discovered, but their orbit calculations show that it is an old "missing" comet.

An example is 11P/Tempel–Swift–LINEAR, which was discovered in 1869 but disappeared after being perturbed by Jupiter in 1908. It was not until 2001 that it was accidentally rediscovered by LINEAR.

5. Collision

Some comets have more spectacular endings - either falling into the sun, or shattering into another planet or celestial body.

Observations

New comets may be discovered using wide-field telescope photography or binoculars. However, even without optical equipment, amateur astronomers can still download images from some satellites online, such as the SOHO satellite, to discover sungrazing comets. On December 26, 2010, amateur astronomer Micha? Kusiak discovered the 2,000th SOHO comet, and this number will continue to increase steadily for the foreseeable future.

Comets visible to the naked eye are very rare, but amateur astronomical telescopes (50mm to 100mm in diameter) can display quite a few comets in fine detail - several every year, sometimes even in one night. Many can be seen in the night sky at the same time. The orbits of these known comets can usually be plotted using astronomical software.

Compared to other celestial objects, they move quickly, and their movement is usually easily noticeable in the eyepiece of a telescope. However, they move only a few degrees night after night, which is why they are easily spotted by observers using star charts, as shown in the adjacent illustration.