Abstract
Attention is focused on a form of cometary activity which has been known for some time but is poorly understood: the discarding of a plasma tail by a comet. A link is found between plasma-tail rejections and conditions in the solar wind. A model is presented in which a disconnected tail is the end result of magnetic-field-line reconnection in the cometary ionosphere caused by the traversal of a magnetic sector boundary. Observations of plasma tails appear to be the best and only method at present of mapping the interplanetary sector structure out of the ecliptic plane.
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