A THE VISITOR IS hanging in the night skies of the northern hemisphere. Comet neowise was discovered on March 27 by the eponymous Near-Field Infrared Reconnaissance Explorer for Near-Earth Objects, an orbiting telescope owned by NASA, the United States space agency. Neowise was originally “wise”, an instrument released in 2009 to map the entire sky at infrared frequencies. It was reused and renamed in 2013, and is now searching for asteroids and comets. Comet neowise rounded the Sun on July 3 and will make its closest approach to Earth (103.5m km, about two-thirds of the distance from Earth to Sun) on July 22. It is unlikely to outshine Hale-Bopp, the last glowing comet in the Northern Hemisphere, which appeared in 1997. But it’s still worth checking out.
This article appeared in the Science and Technology section of the print edition under the title “Comet NEOWISE lights up the northern skies”
