A Comet’s Tail Always Points Away from the Sun

Contrary to what you might think, a comet’s tail doesn’t trail behind it like a rocket plume. Comets have a coma, the cloud around the nucleus, that may extend hundreds of thousands of kilometers. They also have two tails, a dust tail and a gas tail, and the pressure of sunlight and the solar wind blow the dust and gas away from the Sun, regardless of the comet’s direction. This means that as a comet travels away from the Sun, its tail actually precedes it, like a spotlight leading the way through the darkness of space.