PARIS, KOMPAS.TV – A newly discovered comet will be visible to the naked eye as it hurtles past the Earth and Sun in the coming weeks. This comet may be seen for the first time in 50,000 years, astronomers said as the Straits Times report on Saturday (7/1/2023).
The comet is called C/2022 E3 (ZTF), after the Zwicky Transient Facility space center, which first saw it pass in front of Jupiter in March 2022.
C/2022 E3 (ZTF) is a long-period comet discovered by the Zwicky Transient Facility on March 2, 2022.
The comet will reach perihelion on January 12, 2023 at a distance of 1.11 AU (166 million km) and make its closest approach to Earth on February 1, 2023 at a distance of 0.28 AU (42 million km ).
The comet should be brighter than magnitude 6 and therefore visible to the unaided eye.
After traveling the icy trajectory of our solar system, it will approach the Sun on January 12 and pass closest to the Earth on February 1.
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These will be easy to spot with good binoculars and perhaps even with the naked eye, as long as the sky isn’t overly lit by city lights or the moon.
“The comet will be brightest the closest it gets to Earth,” said Dr. Thomas Prince, a professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology who works at the Zwicky Transient Facility.
Made of ice and dust and emitting a greenish aura, the comet is estimated to be about a kilometer in diameter, said Dr Nicolas Biver, an astrophysicist at the Paris Observatory.
This makes it much smaller than Neowise, the last comet visible to the naked eye, which passed the Earth in March 2020, and Hale-Bopp, which passed in 1997 with a diameter of about 60 km which could potentially trigger the apocalypse on Earth. Land.
But the most recent visit will get closer to Earth. “Maybe it sheds some light on the fact that it’s not that big,” Dr. Biver said.
While the comet is brightest when it passes Earth in early February, the full moon can make observing difficult.
