Comets are truly fascinating objects. They¡¯re not very common to appear but whenever they do, they¡¯re truly breathtaking.?
And now, findings from a 2002 NASA spacecraft might have revealed a comet with a tail over a billion kilometres long, a record-breaking length discovered 18 years after.
To put this into perspective this is around 7.5 times as long as the distance between Earth and our star, the Sun (roughly 621 million miles).?
The comet is named 153P/Ikeya-Zhang. The tail of the comment is actually double the length of the previous record-holder dubbed Comet Hyakutake.
According to reports, Researchers looked at data going back 18 years in 2002 when NASA¡¯s Cassini spacecraft was on its journey through the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn. At that very moment, it had detected a sudden spike in the number of protons.?
Scientists in the past haven¡¯t been able to understand what truly happened there. However, now a team of scientists in the UK and the US feel that this was in fact coming from the ionised tail of Comet 153P/Ikeya-Zhang.
In case you didn¡¯t know, when an orbiting comet comes in contact with the Sun, it causes the tail to appear and these are often in two specific types -- the dust tail which is by far the most common that occurs when sun¡¯s radiation melts the comet inside out resulting in the trapped gas and dust to come out.?
The second time is an ion tail when the core of the comet gets ionised due to the sun¡¯s radiation.
In the case of Comet 153P/Ikeya-Zhang, researchers claim that protons stripped from hydrogen gas during this ionization could be transported by the solar wind in the direction of the spacecraft.?
The researchers, therefore, conclude in the paper (published in arXiv) that Cassini did fly through Comet 153P/Ikeya-Zhang¡¯s ion tail. And this record won¡¯t be on the wall for a long time as probes have often crossed the tail of a comet.?