Comet C/2020 F3 will make its closest approach to the Earth at a distance of 64 mn miles while crossing outside orbit of Earth on July 22, 2020

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Comet C/2020 F3 will make its closest approach to the Earth at a distance of 64 mn miles while crossing outside orbit of Earth on July 22, 2020

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Key point -  

1. It is also known as NEOWISE after the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) telescope that discovered it.
2. It will be visible through binoculars or a small telescope.
3. The word comet comes from the Latin word ‘Cometa’ which means ‘long-haired’.
4. The earliest known record of a comet sighting was made by an astrologer in 1059 BC.
5. Comets are mostly made of dust, rocks and ice and can range in their width from a few miles to tens of miles wide.
6. When they orbit closer to the sun, like C/2020 F3, they heat up and release debris of dust and gases.
7. When near the sun, the icy cometary surfaces vaporize and throw off large quantities of gas and dust thus forming the enormous atmosphere and tails.
8. The released gases form a glowing head that can often be larger than a planet and the debris forms a tail that can stretch out to millions of miles.
9. Each time a comet passes the sun, it loses some of its material and it will eventually disappear completely as a result.
10. There are more than 3,650 known comets as of now.
11. The predictable comets are the short-period comets which take less than 200 years to orbit around the sun.
12. These can be found in the Kuiper belt, where many comets orbit the sun in the realm of Pluto.
13. One of the most famous short-period comets is called Halley’s Comet that reappears every 76 years. Halley’s will be sighted next in 2062.
14. The less-predictable comets can be found in the Oort cloud that is about 100,000 AU (Astronomical Unit which is the distance between the Earth and the Sun and is roughly 150 million km) from the sun or 100,000 times the distance between the Earth and the sun.
15. Comets in this cloud can take as long as 30 million years to complete one rotation around the sun.
16. Astronomers believe that comets hold important clues about the formation of the solar system and it is possible that comets brought water and other organic compounds to Earth.

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