Longest known comet tail stretched for over a billion kilometres

By Jonathan O’Callaghan

PEKKA PARVIAINEN/science PHOTO LIBRARY

Findings from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft hold revealed a file-breaking comet, with an ion tail that stretched extra than seven instances the gap between Earth and the sun.

Geraint Jones at College School London and his colleagues looked thru past info from the mission in 2002, when Cassini was on its design from Jupiter to Saturn. The spacecraft extinct its plasma instrument from 2001 to 2003 to witness charged particles from the sun called the solar wind.

Jones and his crew stumbled on a famous develop in protons detected …