dust tail

The other side of the disc can sometimes be seen, though it tends to be lost in the dust tail.

However, it has never been observed to exhibit a coma, gas jet, or dust tail, typical features of comets.

Some main-belt comets display a cometary dust tail only for a part of their orbit near perihelion.

March 16 - Observation of the dust tail of the asteroid P/2010 A2.

It shone brighter than any star in the sky except Sirius, and its dust tail stretched 40-45 degrees across the sky.

On occasions a short tail pointing in the opposite direction to the ion and dust tails may be seen - the antitail.

Its orbit keeps it within the asteroid belt, yet it displayed a dust tail like a comet while near perihelion in 1996, 2001, and 2007.

These were once thought somewhat mysterious, but are merely the end of the dust tail apparently projecting ahead of the comet due to our viewing angle.

From the observations, the extent of the dust tail appears to correspond to 200 times the distance of Earth from the Sun, or 18 billion miles.

It reached perihelion on 1 May 1996, brightening again and exhibiting a dust tail in addition to the gas tail seen as it passed the Earth.

In addition to the well-known gas and dust tails, Hale-Bopp also exhibited a faint sodium tail, only visible with powerful instruments with dedicated filters.

A shorter, white dust tail more than one million miles wide also materialized and curled out on the sides of the larger tail like the fins of a fish.

Interpretation of (596) Scheila's Triple Dust Tails (arXiv:1110.1150 : 6 Oct 2011)

The tail of dust is left behind in the comet's orbit in such a manner that it often forms a curved tail called the type II or dust tail.

The purpose of these observations was to look for "volatile outgassing, dust coma development and dust production rates, dust tail development, and jet activity and outbursts."

Balog's team was the first to observe protoplanetary disk photoevaporation and the resulting dust tail using NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope.

While the comet's dust tail roughly followed the path of the comet's orbit and the gas tail pointed almost directly away from the Sun, the sodium tail appeared to lie between the two.

The antitail appears, when viewed from Earth, as a spike projecting from the comet's coma towards the sun, and thus geometrically opposite to the other tails: the ion tail and the dust tail.

Dr. Francois Colas at the Pic du Midi Observatory in the Pyrenees of France reported that he had observed two "condensations," or bright blips, in the comet's dust tail.

Since it is the escaping gases that drive the dust particles from the nucleus - the solid part of the comet - the comet no longer creates the long beautiful dust tail that we can sometimes see in the night sky.

A bright dust tail is created by the reflection of sunlight from dust streaming from the comet, while a fainter ion tail is made up of electrically charged atoms swept from the comet by the solar wind.

Despite all the spiral shapes in nature, like water going down the bathtub drain, shells like the nautilus or galaxies like the Milky Way, the long, curving dust tail of the star was still a new sight to test the explanatory powers of astronomers.

The meteoroids spread out along the entire orbit of the comet to form a meteoroid stream, also known as a "dust trail" (as opposed to a comet's "dust tail" caused by the very small particles that are quickly blown away by solar radiation pressure).

As the comet approached the Sun, it continued to brighten, shining at 2nd magnitude in February, and showing a growing pair of tails, the blue gas tail pointing straight away from the Sun and the yellowish dust tail curving away along its orbit.

In some cases, such as the Great Comet of 1882, a comet develops a visible antitail or dust tail, which points in a different direction and when the viewing angle and parallax are just right may appear to point in the opposite direction from the normal ion tail.