The Sunward Spike of Halley's Comet

Details The Sunward Spike of Halley's Comet The Sunward Spike of Halley's Comet

Nov 1987

adsabs.harvard.edu/cgi-bin/nph-data_query?bibcode=1987a%26a...187..645s&link_type=abstract

Astronomy and Astrophysics, Vol.187, NO. 1+2/NOV, P. 645, 1987

Astronomy and Astrophysics

Astrophysics

7

Scientific paper

On wide-field photographs from late April till early June 1986, comet Halley is seen to display a spike-like extension in the general direction of the Sun, projecting to distances of about 700,000 km from the nucleus. The spike was composed of dust and its enormous sunward extent (compared to other dust features) suggests an anomalously high ratio of particle ejection velocity to solar radiation pressure. The grains are either dielectric or slightly absorbing, ≪ 0.1 μm in size, and undetected optically from Earth except when it is located in or very near a plane of their concentration. The only plane to which these grains ejected from Halley's wobbling nucleus can possibly be confined for long is the plane normal to the comet's angular momentum vector. This concept is applied to interpret the spike observations.

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