In 1997, Europe’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO) Satellite showed that the tail stretched some 45,000,000 kilometres into space, more than 600 times as far as anyone had realized and almost far enough to “tickle” the earth when the two planets are in line with the sun. “In this sense”, scientists write, “Venus can be likened to a comet, which has an induced magnetotail of similar origin.”