Before Monday’s solar eclipse occurs, eagle-eyed skywatchers will have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see a rare green comet, nicknamed the ‘Mother of Dragons,’ in the night sky.
According to astronomers, Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks is visible at night from the Northern Hemisphere in early April.
Larger than Mount Everest, it should appear as a green blob with a misty tail as it makes its first visit to the inner solar system in 71 years.
To see Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks, look west in the night sky and find the constellation of stars known as Aries the Ram, which forms a loose V.
Over the next few weeks it will continue to advance westward, towards Orion, the constellation that resembles the great mythical hunter.
To see Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks, look west in the night sky and find the constellation of stars known as Aries the Ram, which forms a loose V. Over the next few weeks it will continue to advance westward, towards Orion, the constellation that resembles the great mythical hunter.
Amateur astronomers have already been taking pictures of the comet with specialized telescopes. This image is a three-color composite, showing the comet’s ever-changing ion tail in light blue, its outer coma in green, and highlighting some bright red gas around the spiral-shaped coma. The spiral is thought to be caused by gas ejected from the slowly rotating object’s core.
“The comet can now be found in the constellation Aries, which is visible in the early afternoon, in the west,” Gregory Brown, an astronomer at the Royal Greenwich Observatory, told MailOnline.
‘It will only be visible after twilight and will set around 10pm BST.
“While it is possible to see with the naked eye, it is best to try to observe with a pair of binoculars or a small telescope.”
The public should be on the lookout for what looks like “an irregularly shaped dirty snowball,” or a faint star-like mass with a hazy tail and a green tinge.
Its appearance is green due to the presence of a molecule called dicarbon, which emits a greenish glow in sunlight.
Currently, it is getting progressively closer to the Sun and Earth as it is pulled by our star’s gravity.
On April 21, it will come within 116.8 million kilometers (72.5 million miles) of the Sun, while on June 2 it will come within 232 million kilometers (144 million miles) of Earth.
Photographer Josh Dury photographed 12P/Pons-Brooks on March 6, from Compton Martin in Mendip Hills, Somerset.
Comet 12P/Pons-Brooks is one of the brightest known periodic comets, with an orbital period of 71 years, meaning the chances of seeing this object are rare.
Composite photograph of Comet 12/Pons-Brooks taken in Kendal, Cumbria by Stuart Atkinson on Saturday 16 March 2024.
The comet abruptly increased its brightness almost 100 times on October 31 and continued to get brighter in the following days. This is the second outbreak of 12P/Pons-Brooks in a calendar month and the third since July. Shown here on July 27, 2023, a week after its first burst.
But by then it will be too late to see it in the northern hemisphere, according to Jessica Lee, an astronomer at the Royal Greenwich Observatory.
“From June, once the comet has passed the Sun, it will only be visible to observers in the southern hemisphere,” he told MailOnline.
“It will become increasingly faint as it travels toward the outer solar system and will not approach Earth again until 2095.”
12P/Pons-Brooks is what is known as a cryovolcanic (or cold volcano) comet, meaning it exhibits volcanic activity.
But instead of spewing molten rock and lava like a volcano on Earth, a cryovolcanic comet releases a mixture of gases and ice.
When a cryovolcanic comet approaches the Sun, as 12P/Pons-Brooks is now doing, it heats up and generates pressure in the core.
The pressure continues to build until the nitrogen and carbon monoxide explode, spewing icy debris through large cracks in the core shell.
These gaseous streams can form distinctive shapes when viewed through a telescope, such as the devil’s horns, also described as a horseshoe, or the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars.
Some have speculated that the horseshoe shape also resembles the Millennium Falcon spaceship from Star Wars.
12P/Pons-Brooks is what is known as a cryovolcanic (or cold volcano) comet, meaning it exhibits volcanic activity. But instead of spewing molten rock and lava like a volcano on Earth, a cryovolcanic comet releases a mixture of gases and ice. According to an astronomer, the comet erupted on October 31, the second time in a calendar month.
Sketches of comet 12P/Pons-Brooks from January 21 and 22, 1884 during one of its rare periods of visibility
Like planets, comets in our solar system orbit the sun because they are attracted by the sun’s enormous gravitational pull.
12P/Pons-Brooks takes 71 years to complete one orbit around the Sun, but this is relatively short compared to the orbital length of most orbits which take thousands of years.
Comets typically have very “elliptical” orbits, meaning they are elongated and not perfectly circular.
These elliptical orbits take them very close to the sun at one point in their orbit (perihelion) and very far from the sun at another point (aphelion).
Like all orbiting bodies, the closer comets are to the Sun, the faster they move.
12P/Pons-Brooks is currently heading towards the Sun (and therefore also towards Earth) at more than 40,000 miles per hour (20 km per second).
But this could increase to more than 100,000 miles per hour as it approaches the sun, also known as its perihelion.
After getting closer to us, the space rock will be gravitationally flung back to the outer solar system and won’t return until 2095.