the.com/comettail
a frozen ghost the sun rips loose, always pointing away from the fire that woke it
means the long, glowing stream of gas and dust that trails behind a comet as it nears the sun, always swept away from it by solar radiation and wind.
from From "comet" plus "tail." "Comet" comes through Latin cometa from Greek komētēs, meaning "long-haired" — from komē, "hair of the head." The ancient Greeks saw these objects as stars with flowing hair, an aster komētēs, a "long-haired star." "Tail" is plain Old English tæg(e)l, the same word for an animal's hindmost appendage. So the comet's tail is, etymologically, a strange doubling: the trailing hair of a hairy star.
- sun-blown
- always points away from the sun, never trailing behind
- two tails
- comets often grow separate dust and gas streamers
- vast
- tails can stretch over 100 million miles
- near vacuum
- thinner than the best lab vacuums on Earth
- solar wind
- shaped by charged particles streaming off the sun
comet tail ionization — nasa observations show comet tails extend millions of kilometers, like neowise in 2020 stretching across earth's sky
comet hyakutake tail — great comet of 1996 had a tail spanning 120° across the night sky, one of the longest ever recorded