A comet not seen since prehistoric man first ventured out of Africa 80,000 years ago is on its way to Earth and should be visible to the naked eye.
Formally known as C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS), the comet was first documented on February 22 by four telescopes in South Africa, Chile and Hawaii.
C/2023 A3 is currently flying at 180,610 miles per hour between Saturn and Jupiter and will fly within 36 million miles of the sun in September 2024.
And it is expected to be visible over our planet a month later.
While not much is known about the comet, data shows it is a “very large object” that should safely orbit the sun before being visible to the naked eye in our sky.
C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) was first documented on February 22 by four telescopes in South Africa, Chile and Hawaii. Pictured are images of the comet in space
Qicheng Zhang with the University of Pennsylvania shared in a post to astronomers that “conditions are extremely favorable for this comet, the most promising in many years, and that it could very well create an Eagle-Roland-like post-perihelion display if it survives (that comet’s geometry seemed very on each other).
“However, I certainly wouldn’t take that as a guarantee at this point, and it wouldn’t be unprecedented for this comet to turn out to have a nucleus less than a mile in size that disintegrates, leaving nothing to see at its theoretical best.”
As of March 2023, the comet is still 680 million miles from the sun, but will swing between Earth and the sun in September.
It won’t be until October before the comet emerges from the sun’s blinding rays for the people of Earth to see. And it could shine as bright as Venus in the night sky.
Comets, called “dirty snowballs” by astronomers, are balls of ice, dust and rock that mostly emanate from the ring of icy material called the Oort cloud at the outer edge of our solar system.
Around a comet is a thin, gaseous atmosphere filled with more ice and dust called a coma.
As they approach the sun, comets melt, releasing a stream of gas and dust that is blown off their surfaces by solar radiation and plasma, forming a cloudy outward tail.
Comets move toward the inner solar system as they are dislodged from the Oort cloud by different gravitational forces, becoming more visible as they get closer to the sun’s heat.
And fewer than a dozen comets are discovered each year by observatories around the world.
While not much is known about the comet, data shows it is a “very large object” that should safely orbit the sun before it would be visible to the naked eye in our sky
C/2023 A3 is currently flying at 180,610 miles per hour between Saturn and Jupiter and will fly within 36 million miles of the sun in September 2024
Astronomers predict that C/2023 A3 could be about 100 times brighter than the green comet that stunned the world in February.
The green comet, formally known as C/2022 E3, whizzed past Earth for the first time since the Neanderthal era 50,000 years ago.
E3 was discovered in March 2022 by astronomers using the Zwicky Transient Facility’s wide-field survey camera.
Comprised of ice and rock, with a spectacular dust tail behind it, E3 would have traveled billions of miles from the Oort Cloud – a vast icy expanse of debris surrounding the solar system.
Skygazers who ventured out to witness the once-in-a-lifetime comet noticed its bright green coma and long, glowing tail.
This was the first cosmic snowball visible to the naked eye since comet NEOWISE, formally known as C/2020 F3, in July 2020.
NEOWISE is the brightest comet visible from the northern hemisphere since Hale-Bopp in 1997.
Comet Neowise was first spotted by – and named after – NASA’s Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) space telescope in March 2020
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