A comet tail is an extended structure formed from material released by a comet. Its dust tail is shaped largely by radiation pressure, while an ion tail is shaped by the solar wind and magnetic field. The cometary dust tail is the solid-grain component.
A cometary dust tail is the extended distribution of solid grains released by a comet. Radiation pressure sorts its grains by size: high- grains are displaced rapidly in the anti-stellar direction, while larger low- grains remain closer to the projected orbit and form a more curved trail.
With uniformly distributed apsidal orientations, the phase-mixed radial probability of a Kepler orbit gives the surface probability per cometFor , this is . Multiply by the population size for a number surface density of a disk.
