Comets!
image from NASA/MSFC/Aaron Kingery
Comets are objects in the sky that are made of frozen gas, dust, and rock that orbit the sun. Some comets can be as big as a small town! When a comet gets close to the sun, it heats up and starts releasing its gas and dust, causing it to glow and have a tail that can stretch for millions of miles behind it.
The word "comet" comes from the Greek word "kometes" which means "long hair". A comet's long tail can look like long hair :)
Comets are named after the person who discovered it or the spacecraft used to discover it. Halley's comet is named after its discoverer, English astronomer Edmond Halley, and is visible once every 75 or 76 years. The last time that it was seen was 1986.
Our newest comet, discovered in March of 2020, is called Comet NEOWISE. It is named after the NASA space telescope that discovered it: NEOWISE.
NEOWISE stands for Near Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer.
You can look for Comet NEOWISE just after sunset in the northwest sky near the Big Dipper.
Happy hunting!
