Abstract
Remote sensing observations1,2,3,4,5 and the direct sampling of material6,7,8 from a few comets have established the characteristic composition of cometary gas. This gas is ionized by solar ultraviolet radiation and the solar wind to form ‘pick-up’ ions9,10,11, ions in a low ionization state that retain the same compositional signatures as the original gas. The pick-up ions are carried outward by the solar wind, and they could in principle be detected far from the coma. (Sampling of pick-up ions has also been used to study interplanetary dust12,13, Venus’ tail14 and the interstellar medium15,16.) Here we report the serendipitous detection of cometary pick-up ions, most probably associated with the tail of comet Hyakutake, at a distance of 3.4 au from the nucleus. Previous observations have provided a wealth of physical and chemical information about a small sample of comets6,7,8,9, but this detection suggests that remote sampling of comet compositions, and the discovery of otherwise invisible comets, may be possible.
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Acknowledgements
The SWICS instrument was developed by a collaboration of the universities of Maryland, Bern and Braunschweig, and the Max-Planck Institut für Aeronomie. We thank C. Gloeckler for help with data reduction, and M. R. Combi and M. F. A’Hearn for discussions. This work was supported by NASA/JPL and the Swiss National Science Foundation.
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Gloeckler, G., Geiss, J., Schwadron, N. et al. Interception of comet Hyakutake's ion tail at a distance of 500 million kilometres. Nature 404, 576–578 (2000). https://doi.org/10.1038/35007015
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/35007015
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