The NASA / ESA Hubble Space Telescope has taken the closest images yet of the last visitor of the sky to make the headlines, comet C / 2020 F3 NEOWISE, after it passed through the sun. This color image of the comet was created on August 8, 2020. The two structures that appear on the left and right sides of the comet center are jets of sublimating ice from below the surface of the core, causing dust and bring gas spray through at a high speed. The jets appear as cone-like structures, then are fanned out by the rotation of the comet’s comet. Credit: NASA, ESA, Q. Zhang (California Institute of Technology), A. Pagan (STScI)
The NASA / ESA Hubble Space Telescope has taken the closest images yet of the last visitor of the sky to make the headlines, comet C / 2020 F3 NEOWISE, after it passed through the sun. The new images of the comet were taken on August 8 and feature the visitor’s coma, the fine shell surrounding its core, and its dusty output.
Comet NEOWISE is the brightest comet visible from the Northern Hemisphere since the Hale-Bopp comet of 1997. It is estimated to travel at more than 60 kilometers per second. The closest approach of the comet to the sun was on July 3 and is now back to the outer reaches of the solar system, to go through our neighborhood in less than 7000 years.
NEOWISE’s Hubble observation is the first time that a comet of this brightness has been photographed at such a high resolution after its passage through the Sun. Earlier attempts to photograph other light comets (such as comet ATLAS) were unsuccessful because they disintegrated in the hot heat.
Comets often break apart due to thermal and gravity stresses at such close meetings, but Hubble’s opinion suggests that the solid core of NEOWISE remained intact. This heart of the comet is too small to see directly through Hubble. The ice ball can not be more than 4.8 kilometers across. But the Hubble image captures part of the large cloud of gas and dust around the core, which measures about 18,000 kilometers in this image.
Hubble’s observation also resolves a few jets from the core that shoot out in opposite directions. They come from the core of the comet as cones of dust and gas, and are then curved into wider fan-like structures by the rotation of the core. Jets are the result of ice that sublimates beneath the surface, expressing the dust / gas at high speed.
This ground-based image of comet C / 2020 F3 (NEOWISE) was taken from the Northern Hemisphere on July 16, 2020. The inserted image, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope on August 8, 2020, reveals a close-up of the comet after his pass through the Sun. The image of Hubble zeroes in on the core of the comet, which is too small to see. It is estimated that it is no more than 4.8 kilometers over another measure. Instead, the image shows part of the comet’s coma, the fuzzy glow, which is about 11,000 miles (18,000 kilometers) in this image. Comet NEOWISE will not pass through the inner solar system for nearly 7,000 years. Credit: NASA, ESA, STScI, Q. Zhang (Caltech); ground image copyright © 2020 by Zoltan G. Levay, used with permission
The Hubble photos can also help reveal the color of the comet’s dust and how that color changes as the comet leaves the sun. This in turn may explain how solar heat affects the content and structure of that substance and the coma of the comet. The ultimate goal here would be to determine the original properties of the substance. Researchers who used Hubble to observe the comet are currently delving further into the data to see what they can find.
Hubble took other known comet visitors prisoner the following year. This includes snapshots of the breakup of comet ATLAS in April 2020 and impressive images of interstellar comet 2I BORISOV in October 2019 and December 2019.
Parker Solar Probe spies newly discovered comet NEOWISE
Provided by ESA / Hubble Information Center
Citation: Hubble snaps close-up comet NEOWISE (2020, August 21st) Retrieved August 22, 2020 from https://phys.org/news/2020-08-hubble-snaps-close-up-comet-neowise.html
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