Comet C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE) emission lines

Since the study of comets offers a unique opportunity to investigate the early stages of the formation and evolution of our Sun and the Solar System, we obtained high-resolution optical spectra (R={lambda}/{Delta}{lambda}=115000) of comet NEOWISE. The unique passage and its brightness yielded spectra with a large number of emission lines, providing information on the coma composition and the physical and chemical processes occurring in the nucleus.

The spectra have been used to generate a catalog of emission lines to be used for future studies of comets since there are no catalogs in the literature with such a high spectral resolution. Two high-resolution spectra of comet NEOWISE were obtained, on 26 July 2020 (geocentric distance of 0.7au) and 5 August 2020 (geocentric distance of 0.89au), with the High Accuracy Radial velocity Planet Searcher for the Northern hemisphere (HARPS-N) echelle spectrograph installed on the 360cm Telescopio Nazionale Galileo (TNG).