#dust tail

The tails of Comet NEOWISE!! Comet’s usually have 2 tails that always point away from the Sun.

Here, NEOWISE’s blue ion tail on the left points directly away from the Sun and is pushed out by the flowing and charged solar wind. Structure in the ion tail comes from different rates of expelled blue-glowing ions from the comet’s nucleus, as well as the always changing structure of our Sun’s wind.

The other tail, the dust tail, is pushed out by sunlight, but curves towards its orbital path as heavier dust particles are better able to resist this light pressure. Comet NEOWISE’s (Comet C/2020 F3) impressive dust-tail striations are not fully understood, as yet, but likely related to rotating streams of sun-reflecting grit liberated by melting ice on its 5-kilometer wide nucleus.

Image Credit & Copyright: Zixuan Lin (Beijing Normal U.)