Comets do not always survive their stay in the inner solar system, but a new close-up image suggests that the comet NEOWISE – the brightest in decades – has held it together.
Some 6,800 years from now, our descendants, would they still be round, can expect a return visit from comet NEOWISE. This comet is 3 kilometers wide (5-kilometers) seems to have survived his recent journey walked the Sun, as revealed by a new one close-up image taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The solid core remains intact, pointing to a potential return thousands of years from now.
This comet, formally known as C / 2020 F3 (NEOWISE), was first detected this past March, and it turned out to be the brightest comet seen in the Northern Hemisphere since Hale-Bopp in 1997. NEOWISE was visible to the naked eye from early July to mid-August and made his nearest approach to the Sun on July 3 and comes within 43 million miles km), as just within the orbit of Mercury. The comet is now rapidly returning to the outer solar system at about 37 miles per second (60 km / s).
The solid icy core, as a core, may not actually be visible in the new photo, which was taken on August 8, but the image shows some of the gas and dust coming out of the comet, and forms a cloud measuring 11,000 km 18,000 km. This marks the “first time Hubble has photographed a comet of this brightness at such a resolution to this density of a pass through the sun,” according to a Hubble press release.
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Comets are best described as giant dirty snowballs that formed in the outer solar system centuries ago. When they are close to the Sun, they enter a temporary active state, resulting in a light coma and jets shooting from the surface and forming a long comet tail.
Some comets do not survive these meetings, disintegrating due to heat and gravity pressure. This happened with comet ISON in 2013 and more recently to C / 2019 Y4 ATLAS, which should become the brightest comet in decades. Astronomers were not sure if the same fate could occur comet NEOWISE.
To find out, Caltech graduate student Qicheng Zhang, along with colleagues, captured the new image of comet NEOWISE, revealed no distinctionble signs of fragmentation.
“Hubble has much better resolution than we can get with any other telescope of this comet,” Zhang explained in the Hubble press release. “That resolution is very important for seeing details very close to the core. It shows us changes in the dust immediately after it is stripped from that nucleus due to solar heat, and dust so stalls as close to the original properties of the comet as possible. ”
Astronomers will now closely monitor any changes to the comet as it moves further away from the sun, including changes to the color of its dust. Finally, scientists want a better understanding of how solar heating affects the material in the comet and its chemical composition.
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