​The comet named ZTF was discovered in March 2022, since then it has traveled more than 500 million kilometers and will come close enough to Earth to be seen with the naked eye. When will you be able to see it, what will it look like and how will you be able to view it? Although much has been written about this comet approaching Earth once every 50,000 years, it appears that this is not true.

A comet has just been discovered

The comet will be visible from January 12, but it will be best seen in late January and early February. It can also be seen with the naked eye outside of cities, but is best seen with binoculars or a spotting scope. With more powerful instruments, the comet’s mantle will appear greenish because of its chemical composition.

Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) was discovered by astronomers Bryce Bolin and Frank Muskie at the Zwicky Transient Facility, Palomar, California, in March 2022. Here you can see a high-resolution photo of the comet.

Asked by HotNews.ro, Bryce Bolin said that from the comet’s orbit, it can be concluded that it originates from a region called the Hortus cloud, which is a vast space sprinkled with pieces of icy comets left over from the formation of the solar system. He also says that given the comet’s orbit, it cannot be said to pass by Earth once every 50,000 years.

Comets are celestial bodies composed of gaseous rock, dust, and ice that orbit the Sun. Near the Sun, its heat dissipates gas and dust, forming a long tail around the comet’s nucleus.

The Oort cloud is a large collection of comets in the outer reaches of our solar system, named after the Danish astronomer Jan Oort, who first proved its existence in 1950.

It was not and will not be again

The comet was no longer close to Earth 50,000 years ago, and it will not appear again for the next 50,000 years, explains astronomer Adrian Schonka.

“There is a small problem here. This comet is not periodic, it will never visit us again, I don’t know where this information came from that it will visit us after 50,000 years. It is not a periodic comet and will never return to the Sun. Now we see it for the first and last time, this is its first pass by the Sun, but at the same time the last one,” astronomer Adrian Shonka explains to HotNews.ro.

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And in an article in the Boston Globe, one of the two astronomers who discovered the comet says that we do NOT know if it came close to Earth in the Paleolithic 50,000 years ago.

Bryce Bolin of Caltech also makes a cute comparison between comets and…cats: “Comets are kind of the cats of the solar system because they do what they want, and like cats, they’re fluffy. Comets with strange fragmentation or disintegration behavior have been observed”

Astronomer Adrian Schonka explains that it is very difficult to say whether a comet can be observed with the naked eye or not. “Comets are unpredictable, we have a formula, an equation, where we put in values ​​like their size, the way they pass the Sun and the Earth, and we find a glow, but that calculated glow is not always the same as what one observes.”

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This comet will probably be visible to the naked eye from other cities in early February, when C/2022 E3 (ZTF) will be closest to Earth at a distance of less than 45 million km, which is quite a short distance from Earth for a comet. When it was discovered almost a year ago, the comet was about 700 million kilometers from the Sun.

Interestingly, in early February this comet will be visible all night from the Northern Hemisphere, so it will be very visible in binoculars from January 25th until around February 10th.

And it is clearly visible in a telescope, but you need to know the sky to find it. If you have rarely used a telescope before, it will be very difficult for you to detect it. It depends a lot on how bright it will be, but it will be visible as a bright band, but not a very big one, explains Adrian Șonka.

What will a person notice when looking at a comet? Starting from January 30 to February 5-6, if you look at it every half hour, you can notice that it has moved, changed its position in the sky.

There will be a few times when the comet will be easier to find because it will pass by bright objects: On February 5, it will fly past the star Capella, one of the brightest stars in the winter night sky. On February 11, the comet will pass by Mars, and on February 14, it will pass by the star Aldebaran. Here you can see some maps.

Comets – what they are, where they are found and since when they captivate people

Comets are the most spectacular celestial bodies, and most of them originate in a region called the Hortus Cloud, where they take thousands or even millions of years to complete a complete revolution around the Sun. The second important group comes from the Kuiper belt, and these comets are called “short-period” comets because their orbital cycles do not exceed 200 years.

The Kuiper Belt is a region in the Solar System where most of the dwarf planets are located, and the extent is huge: from the orbit of Neptune to a distance of 50 AU from the Sun (7.5 billion km).

The term “comet” comes from the Greek “kometes”, which means “pletos”. These objects are remnants of the formation of the solar system 4.6 billion years ago. Composed of dust, frozen water and carbon dioxide, comets were thought to be big dirty snowballs.

Comets begin to melt as they pass Jupiter on their way to the Sun. The sun’s heat evaporates the ice, which forms a halo of gas and dust, or “mane,” around the comet’s nucleus. Approaching the orbit of Mars, comets begin to form long and spectacular tails, sometimes millions of kilometers.

Returning to the solar wind, comet tails always point toward the Sun. The dust is pushed by the sun’s rays, forming a bright, white, slightly bent tail. Smaller pairs are pushed by solar wind particles, forming a straight, bluish, less bright tail.

This is what Neil deGrasse Tyson writes about comets: “Comets are lumps of space. They usually do not exceed several kilometers in diameter and consist of ice, dust, frozen gases and various other particles. In fact, they may even be asteroids with an icy shell that has not completely evaporated. To decide whether we are dealing with an asteroid or a comet, we need to know where it formed and where it is.”

People watched comets with fascination many thousands of years ago, and the Chinese have records of the appearance of various comets in the sky as far back as 4000 years ago, there is a lot of information in the old chronicles, between 2100 and 250 BC.

The most famous Halley’s comet, which passes by the Earth once every 75-76 years, and in 1986 it made a sensation, the photos taken then became famous, for the first time with modern equipment.

Astronomer Edmond Halley was the first to realize that this comet had a periodic orbit and correctly predicted that it would return near Earth in 1758. The earliest evidence of the comet dates back to 2,200 years ago, and is mentioned in the Bayeux Tapestry, the famous nearly 70-meter-long embroidered cloth that depicts the events leading up to the Norman Conquest of England nearly a millennium ago. Earthlings will be able to see Halley’s comet again in the sky only in 2061.

Edmond Halley was the first astronomer to realize that stars move. He discovered it in 1718 by comparing the position of the star Arcturus on the maps of the Greek astronomer Hipparchus more than 18 centuries earlier with the position of the star in the early 18th century.

NASA has sent several missions to study comets in detail, starting with the Deep Space 1 mission, which reached Comet Borrelli in 2001. The images of Comet Churyumov-Gerasimenko obtained by the Rosetta and Philae probes a few years ago were very impressive.

Among the most famous comets Hale-Bopp, Shoemaker-Levy 9, Tempel 1 and ISON.

Photo source: Dreamstime.com