Hale-Bopp: the electric comet
Image credit: TW
A team of scientists analyzing the coma and tail of Comet Hale-Bopp have published their observations in a landmark paper but what they discovered cannot be explained by the standard model of comets. The scientists analyzed the comet's surprising coma and tail at distances up to 27 times the average distance between the Earth and Sun. The structure of the comet's tail and its relative brightness at such a large heliocentric distance remains a mystery for comet scientists.
Video courtesy of Thunderbolts Project
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