Look at the photos of Comet NEOWISE

Comet C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE) is a retrograde comet with a nearly parabolic orbit discovered on March 27, 2020

space telescope NEOWISE (short for"Infrared object observer with a wide field of observation of a near object"). At the time of its discovery, it was 312 million km from the Sun with a very faint magnitude of +17. This is about 25 thousand times less light from the faintest star that can be seen with the naked eye.

Comet NEOWISE is moving in a parabolic orbit. On July 3, 2020, it passed perihelion, finding itself at a minimum distance of 0.29 astronomical units from the Sun.

Photo: Roscosmos

She will be close to Earth in a few days, 23July, having passed at a distance of 103.5 million km (this is slightly more than half the distance from our planet to the Sun). Comet C / 2020 F3 (NEOWISE) leaves behind a plume of two tails at once: the first consists of dust particles and stretches along the comet's orbit, the second is narrower, consisting of ions.

The next time the comet will return to the Sun in a few thousand years, the aphelion of its orbit is at a distance of 500-700 astronomical units from the Sun.

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