Coffee Lounge

You're correct Jim: The solar wind from the Sun are composed of low density streams of charged particles (like protons and electrons) ~ When they hit the gas and dust from the comet, it gets pushed outwards. Since the gas is so light, the solar wind pushes away to form the ion tail. It also pushes the dust, which is also still pointing away from the sun. It's pretty cool to see, even when the comet's moving away from the sun!

I'm going to go ahead and award ya the 1,000gps, but with the follow up questions they're mainly for the person who answered the trivia question correctly.