Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Space
  3. News

See our solar system’s newest spectacle, comet NEOWISE, in glorious detail

By

Our part of the solar system has a spectacular new visitor, a comet technically identified as C/2020 F3 NEOWISE but more commonly called simply NEOWISE. This bright comet passed extremely close to the sun last week and is now visible, even with the naked eye, as it speeds away from the sun toward Earth.

The comet is named after the mission which discovered it, a NASA mission to survey near-Earth objects, the Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or NEOWISE. The mission first detected the comet in March this year.

Recommended Videos

“In its discovery images, comet NEOWISE appeared as a glowing, fuzzy dot moving across the sky even when it was still pretty far away. As soon as we saw how close it would come to the sun, crossing inside the orbit of Mercury, we had hopes that it would put on a good show,” Amy Mainzer, principal investigator of NEOWISE, said in a statement.

unprocessed image from the WISPR instrument on board NASA’s Parker Solar Probe shows comet NEOWISE
An unprocessed image from the WISPR instrument onboard NASA’s Parker Solar Probe shows comet NEOWISE on July 5, 2020, shortly after its closest approach to the sun. The sun is out of frame to the left. The faint grid pattern near the center of the image is an artifact of the way the image is created. The small black structure near the lower left of the image is caused by a grain of dust resting on the imager’s lens NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Naval Research Lab/Parker Solar Probe/Brendan Gallagher

The comet was captured in glorious detail this week by NASA’s Parker Solar Probe, which is currently in orbit around the sun and was able to image the comet using its Wide-Field Imager for Solar Probe (WISPR) instrument. Although this instrument is primarily designed for capturing images of the sun and solar winds, it was also able to capture the comet due to its high level of sensitivity which allowed it to see the comet’s tails.

Related

NASA has released both the unprocessed image taken by WISPR and a processed version which shows off greater detail of the comet.

NASA’s Parker Solar Probe shows greater detail in the twin tails of comet NEOWISE
Processed data from the WISPR instrument on NASA’s Parker Solar Probe shows greater detail in the twin tails of comet NEOWISE, as seen on July 5, 2020. The lower, broader tail is the comet’s dust tail, while the thinner, upper tail is the comet’s ion tail. NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Naval Research Lab/Parker Solar Probe/Guillermo Stenborg

Being able to image the comet in such detail has helped astronomers understand more about its properties. “From its infrared signature, we can tell that it’s about 5 kilometers, or 3 miles, across,” Joseph Masiero, NEOWISE Deputy Principal Investigator, said in the statement, “and by combining the infrared data with visible light images, we can tell that the comet’s nucleus is covered with sooty, dark particles leftover from its formation near the birth of our solar system 4.6 billion years ago.”

The comet will be visible over this weekend and early next week as well. If you’d like to look for the comet yourself, Sky and Telescope has a guide to spotting NEOWISE from home.

Editors’ Recommendations

Topics
Georgina Torbet
Georgina Torbet
Space Writer
Georgina is the Digital Trends space writer, covering human space exploration, planetary science, and cosmology. She…
See how the night sky changes over a decade with this NASA time lapse
This mosaic is composed of images covering the entire sky, taken by the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) as part of WISE’s 2012 All-Sky Data Release. By observing the entire sky, WISE can search for faint objects, like distant galaxies, or survey groups of cosmic objects.

You might think that the sky above is unchanging, at least on our human timescales, but that isn't the case. The night sky is active and changing, and it’s visible even on scales of years. Recently, NASA shared a time lapse animation showing the changes in the night sky over a period of more than a decade. Using data collected by the NEOWISE spacecraft, this all-sky map shows how the sky has changed between the launch of the spacecraft in 2009 and today.

NEOWISE: Revealing Changes in the Universe

Read more
NASA’s Space Launch System rocket undamaged by hurricane, will launch next month
artemis i tanking test livestream prelaunch

Hurricane Ian has battered the U.S. Atlantic coast this week, causing widespread destruction and killing at least 30 people. As Ian approached the Florida coast NASA made the decision to roll its Space Launch System rocket off the launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and back inside its building. With the hurricane having moved past Florida, NASA has now confirmed that the rocket was not damaged and has set a new date for the next launch attempt.

The Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, along with the Orion spacecraft, had been scheduled for a third attempt at a launch on Tuesday, September 27. The launch would be for the Artemis I mission, an uncrewed mission around the moon to test hardware and procedures ahead of a planned crewed mission to the moon. But as Ian approached over last weekend, NASA canceled the launch attempt and decided it was too risky to leave the rocket out on the launch pad. It was rolled back to the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) a few miles from the pad where it could be safely stored until the storm passed.

Read more
See the horror of the sun up close from world’s most powerful solar telescope
The first images of the chromosphere – the area of the Sun’s atmosphere above the surface – taken with the Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope on June 3rd, 2022. The image shows a region 82,500 kilometers across at a resolution of 18 km. This image is taken at 486.13 nanometers using the hydrogen-beta line from the Balmer series.

The astronomy community has a new tool for studying the sun, with the inauguration this week of the world's largest solar telescope. The Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, located in Maui, Hawai'i, has a 13-foot (4-meter) primary mirror enabling it to see the sun in phenomenal detail.

To celebrate the telescope's inauguration on August 31, 2022, this week the National Science Foundation (NSF) released a new image of the sun's chromosphere. This is the part of the sun's atmosphere that is right above its surface, and the image shows a region 50,000 miles across where temperatures can be as high as 13,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

Read more