Jakarta, CNBC Indonesia – A comet will pass by Earth in February. The newly discovered comet will be visible to the naked eye as it hurtles past Earth and the Sun in the coming weeks.
The comet is named C/2022 E3 (ZTF) after the Zwicky Transient Facility, which first saw it pass Jupiter in March last year.
It is estimated to be about 26 million miles from Earth on February 2nd. It would be the comet’s closest approach to Earth in 50,000 years.
Comets will be easy to spot with good binoculars and perhaps even with the naked eye, as long as the sky isn’t overly illuminated by city lights or the Moon.
“A comet is brightest when it’s closest to Earth,” said Thomas Prince, a professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology. scientific alarm, Tuesday (10/1/2023).
According to Nivolas Biver, an astrophysicist at the Paris Observatory, the object is made of ice and dust and emits a greenish aura. The comet is estimated to have a diameter of about one kilometer.
This makes it much smaller than NEOWISE, the last comet visible to the naked eye that passed close to Earth in March 2020, and Hale-Bopp, which passed in 1997 with a potentially deadly diameter of about 60 kilometers.
Biver said the comet is believed to have originated in the Oort Cloud, the vast spherical theory surrounding the Solar System and home to mysterious icy bodies.
The last time a comet passed close to Earth was during the Upper Paleolithic, when Neanderthals still roamed the Earth.
Prince said the comet’s next visit to the inner solar system should be in 50,000 years.
But Biver said there is a possibility that after this visit the comet will be permanently ejected from the solar system.
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