The Formation of Tails

Abstract

Although the coma is the chief distinguishing feature of a comet, in the popular mind these objects are most commonly associated with the tails, which many of their number display. Not all comets grow observable tails, and others sport faint appendages only discernible on photographs and CCD images. Nevertheless others sprout tails that are truly magnificent both in size and intensity. The tail of Comet Ikeya-Seki (1965), for example, extended up to a distance equal to that of Earth and the Sun, while ions from the tail of Comet Hyakutake in 1996 were detected by spacecraft at over 3 times that distance from the comet’s head. Then, in 2007, the great Comet McNaught extended a magnificent tail as long as that of Ikeya-Seki but around 65 million km wide!