Ikeya-Zhang has broken the record for the longest tail, beating out the previous record holder by nearly double the length!

Scientists aimed ALMA at the comet in March 2024 and saw carbon monoxide — a gas that usually doesn’t show up in observations that far away — gushing out of its surface in jets. The team also picked ...

In this photo, it also seems that the comet's ion tail is also visible alongside its prominent dust tail. In addition to ...

Narrator] As comets cross this invisible ice line, their ice starts turning into gas. - And that's what forms these long tails that we can see when you look at a comet, and those tails stream away ...

Comet tails get longer as a comet approaches the sun and can end up millions of miles long. The dust tail is formed when solar wind pushes small particles in the coma into an elongated curved path.

But you need to see it soon. The coma and long tail of comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS, also called C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS), is currently shining at magnitude +0.5. That's well within the grasp of ...

“The shape of the transit is typical of a comet with a long tail,” said Marc Hon, another author of the study. “Except that it’s unlikely that this tail contains volatile gases and ice as ...

The closer a comet gets to the Sun, the longer and brighter its tail will grow. The tail can grow significantly longer than the nucleus and clock in around half a million miles long. All comets ...

The same method can be used for naked-eye comets with a long ion tail — only in this case, sweep your eyes back and forth across the sky. The latter is the same technique an observer would use ...

The closer a comet gets to the Sun, the longer and brighter its tail will grow. The tail can grow significantly longer than the nucleus and clock in around half a million miles long. All comets ...

These celestial travelers have captured the minds of many with their beauty for as long as we have peered into the vastness of the cosmos above. But what are comets and why do they have tails?

This close-up image of comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) was taken from the Dark Sky Alqueva reserve in Portugal on Oct. 13, 2024 when the comet was displaying an impressive level of brightness ...