Disconnected Tail
On February 4, 2009, a team of Italian astronomers witnessed "an intriguing phenomenon in Comet Lulin's tail". Team leader Ernesto Guido explains: "We photographed the comet using a remotely-controlled telescope in New Mexico, and our images clearly showed a disconnection event. While we were looking, part of the comet's plasma tail was torn away."
Guido and colleagues believe the event was caused by a magnetic disturbance in the solar wind hitting the comet. Magnetic mini-storms in comet tails have been observed before—most famously in 2007 when NASA's STEREO spacecraft watched a coronal mass ejection crash into Comet Encke. Encke lost its tail in dramatic fashion, much as Comet Lulin did on February 4.
Read more about this topic: Comet Lulin
Famous quotes containing the words disconnected and/or tail:
“In the schoolroom her quick mind had taken readily that strong starch of unexplained rules and disconnected facts which saves ignorance from any painful sense of limpness.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“And now he comes again with clatter of stone,
And mounts the wall again with whited eyes
And all his tail that isn’t hair up straight.”
—Robert Frost (1874–1963)