<Hello, and sorry you think me so stupid. Here is the biggest problem I have with accepted comet theory. What causes the dust trail to fall behind the comet? Seems to me that the comet has to be acted upon to make it accelerate and the dust to not accelerate, or the dust has to decelerate through some force not decelerating the comet. Otherwise the dust would be going in all directions not just behind the comet.

Halley’s Comet.
Image Credit: Bill Arnett’s Nine Planets.

Solar wind comes readily to mind, but there’s more to it than that. The grains that are left behind in the dust trail of a comet do slow in their approach to the Sun, and they do spread, but it takes many years to accomplish this. It should also be noted that a comet’s speed and velocity both alter throughout its journey. Because of this, released debris, due to interaction with Solar radiation causing the breakup of the comet’s icy crust and prompting outgassing, will be traveling at a different velocity from its primary (the comet itself). A change as little as 0.001 percent the comet’s speed is more than enough to form the trail. Sometimes the Earth will cross these trails and we get a meteor show as the tiny grains enter the atmosphere.

Likewise why does the ion trail blow in the solar wind when man made ion trails do not blow in the wind?

On that, one of our particle guys will have to come online to answer. I would have to guess that this is because the ion trail cannot form without the Sun acting as a catalyst, essentially being a source-mechanism for the phenomenon.

These are the basic problems that lead me to re-examine comet theory which I have known for nearly as long as I have been alive.



The other problem has always been why there is no dark side to the coma of the comet. It is dense enough to keep us from seeing the nucleus and from seeing through it.





Working in density again. There actually is a dark side to the comet, as can be readily seen above, but it goes unnoticed due to the size differences encountered. The outgassing of a comet creates an extremely large coma, compared with the size of the nucleus itself. The coma is a dense, light-refracting cloud of dissipating hydrogen, lit very brightly by raw sunlight. Because the comet body, or nucleus, is so comparatively tiny, and the hydrogen cloud, or coma, is so extremely bright, and comparatively huge, there is a dimmer side to the nucleus, but, on a near-approach to the Sun, likely no genuine ‘dark’ side.

Thanks for your patience.

Can’t help myself (married with groan -- I mean ‘grown’ -- children),
Dan