dust tail

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dust tail

Collins Dictionary of Astronomy © Market House Books Ltd, 2006

dust tail

[′dəst ‚tāl]

(astronomy)

A comet tail that consists of particles, typically 1 micrometer in diameter and primarily silicate in composition, and is usually curved with a length in the range from 10⁶ to 10⁷ kilometers.

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References in periodicals archive ?

These trails--a phenomenon related to, but separate from, the dust tails comets flaunt in visible light as they move near the sun--consist of larger, pebble-size debris that scatter sunlight poorly.

Comets: mudballs of the solar system?

Dust tail: The part of the comet that is most spectacular to the naked eye, though faint comets never grow a tail.

Mysterious travelers: humans have been seeing comets for millennia, but we still have a lot more questions than answers

Additionally, you can take longer exposures to reveal the faintest extent of the comet's gas and dust tails, as well as faint deep-sky objects nearby.

Capturing comets: come home with a trophy of Comet ISON using these helpful techniques

dust tail (type II) length: [10.sup.6] - [10.sup.7] km particle size: 0.1 - 100 microns direction: initially anti solar, becoming curved as dust particles follow independent orbits.

Comets

Since Comet 1973f has a perihelion distance that is only about a quarter that of Comet Bennett, it should become much brighter; and if it develops a dust tail, it could be the most spectacular comet of the century.

The great Comet that wasn't

While Comet PanSTARRS took the spotlight in March, fainter Comet C/2012 F6 Lemmon displayed a complex dust tail and greenish coma for astroimagers in the Southern Hemisphere.

Gallery

Noted Austrian astroimager Michael Jager's photograph on March 16th was among the earliest to illustrate the great breadth of PanSTARRS's dust tail, along with a drastically weaker ion tail.

Reflecting on PanSTARRS: rarely is such a bright comet so hard to see

Comet PanSTARRS exhibited a broad, curved dust tail in this image captured over the Very Large Array radio telescope in New Mexico during the early evening twilight of March 17th.

Gallery

The SOHO images obtained around 4:00 UT on December 15th showed the comet was about magnitude -1 and sporting a long, bright, slightly curving dust tail. Also visible was a long but decidedly fainter tail of ionized gas, which was a bit of a surprise because an ion tail had never been positively seen on earlier pygmy sungrazers.

The remarkable case of comet lovejoy: despite the odds against it, comet lovejoy survived its swing by the sun and became one of the most spectacular comets in the past few decades

I was thinking of something that I and relatively few other observers detected in very dark, clear skies in late April and early May 1986: the mostly very faint but amazingly long dust tail of Halley's Comet.

Halley and his comet: what is it like to be passed, in the cold and the still of the night, by a ghost 10,000 times the size of the Earth?

A dust tail is produced by microscopic dust particles released from the comet by the Sun's heat and driven away by sunlight (solar radiation pressure).

Tailless comets

"THE LENGTH OF OPHIUCHUS HUGE." In late November and December 1618 a great comet traversed the predawn sky from Libra to north of Ursa Major, developing a dust tail maybe 70[degrees] long as it passed Arcturus.