PARIS: A newly discovered comet will be visible to the naked eye as it passes Earth and the Sun in the coming weeks, for the first time in 50,000 years, astronomers have said.
The comet is called C/2022 E3 (ZTF) after the Zwicky Transient Facility, which first spotted it passing Jupiter in March last year.
After traveling through the icy reaches of our solar system, it will come closest to the Sun on January 12 and pass close to Earth on February 1.
Attached is a composition of the evolution of comet C/2022 E3.
— Con Stoitsis (@vivstoitsis) January 5, 2023
I have labeled the days, distance from the Sun and distance from Earth. Courtesy Didac Mesa Romeu. pic.twitter.com/fzq4AAMLJe
It should be easy to spot with a good pair of binoculars and possibly even with the naked eye, provided the sky is not overlit by city lights or the moon.
Thomas Prince, a professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology, told AFP that the comet “will be at its brightest when it is closest to Earth.”
Made up of ice and dust and emitting a greenish glow, the comet is about a kilometer in diameter, said Nicolas Beaver, an astrophysicist at the Paris Observatory.
This makes it significantly smaller than NEOWISE, the last comet visible to the unaided eye, which passed Earth in March 2020, and Hale-Bopp, a potentially life-ending comet of about 60 km in diameter in 1997. passed with
But the latest visit will come closer to Earth, which “could make up for the fact that it’s not that big,” Beaver said.
Although the comet will be brightest when it passes Earth in early February, a full moon can make it difficult to spot.
For the Northern Hemisphere, Bayer suggests the last week of January, when the comet passes between the constellations Ursa Minor and Ursa Major.
He said the new moon during the weekend of January 21-22 offers a good opportunity for stargazers.
“We may also get a nice surprise and the object may be twice as bright as expected,” Beaver added.
Another chance to spot the comet in the sky will be on Feb. 10, when it will pass close to Mars, Prince said.
‘Rare Guest’
The comet has spent most of its life “at least 2,500 times farther from Earth than the Sun,” Prince said.
Beaver said the comet is believed to have come from the Oort Cloud, a theoretically vast ring around the Solar System that is home to mysterious icy objects.
The last time a comet passed Earth was in the Upper Paleolithic era, when Neanderthals still roamed the Earth.
The comet’s next visit to the inner solar system was expected in another 50,000 years, Prince said.
But Bior said there was a possibility that the comet would be “permanently expelled from the solar system” after the visit.
Closer observers will include the James Webb Space Telescope. However, it will not take pictures, instead studying the structure of the comet, Beaver said.
The closer a comet is to Earth, the easier it is for telescopes to measure its composition “as the Sun boils off its outer layers,” Prince said.
He added that this “rare visitor” will “give us information about the most distant planets in our solar system.”
