The tails of comets are millions of miles longer than previously thought. The discovery was made by two teams of astronomers who were trying to understand why an instrument on the Ulysses spacecraft - which is studying the solar wind - suddenly went haywire for a few hours in May 1996. They later discovered that two instruments on Ulysses - the solar wind ion composition spectrometer (SWICS) and a magnetometer - were actually measuring the tail of Comet Hyakutake some 500 million kilometres away from the comet's nucleus. The length of the comet's tail was therefore twice that of the previous record holder - the 'Great March Comet' of 1843. The technique may allow other previously 'hidden' comets to be detected (Nature 404 574 and 576).
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