The images don’t seem to show a lot of the activity we’d expect to see from gases and bits breaking off to grow the comet’s tail.
In: Physics
The words “dirty snowball” don’t actually mean a snowball in the sense you’re thinking. It’s just a way to describe that the vast majority of the comet is water ice mixed with various “pollutants” I.e. not h2o
Also most pics are taken in the deep – far enough from the sun that the energy required for melting the ice and creating the spectacular show we associate comets with is not there.
As such the tail is not something that’s always there since it’s matter escaping from the comet which requires energy input (sunlight) of a certain magnitude.
. Well, technically you could say there is a kind of tail even in the deep since some of the matter persists in the comets orbit. Most of it is gone “soon” enough though.
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