PASADENA, KOMPAS.com – A comet which crosses the Earth every 50,000 years and was only discovered to be visible to the naked eye in the next few weeks.
Comet it’s called C/2022 E3 (ZTF), short for the Zwicky Transient Facility that first spotted it beyond Jupiter in March 2022.
After traveling from the cold side of the Solar System, this comet will make its closest approach to the Sun on January 12, 2023 and pass closest to Earth on February 1, 2023.
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Quoted by the news agency AFP extensioncomet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) will be easy to spot with good binoculars and perhaps even with the naked eye, provided the sky is not too brightly lit by city lights or the Moon.
“(The comet) will be brightest the closest it gets to Earth,” said Thomas Prince, a professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology who works at the Zwicky Transient Facility. AFP extension.
Made of ice and dust and emitting a green aura, comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) has an estimated diameter of about one kilometer, said Nicolas Biver, an astrophysicist at the Paris Observatory.
This makes it much smaller than NEOWISE, the last comet visible to the naked eye when it passed Earth in March 2020, as well as Hale-Bopp, which passed in 1997 with a diameter of about 60 kilometers and the potential to end life.
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Although comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) will be brightest when it passes Earth in early February 2023, the full moon can make observing difficult.
Prince added that another chance to find comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) in the sky will come on February 10, 2023 when it passes near Mars.
The comet spends most of its life at least 2,500 times farther from Earth than the Sun, Prince said.
Biver explained that comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) is believed to originate from the Oort Cloud that surrounds the Solar System and is inhabited by mysterious icy objects.
The last time comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) passed by Earth was when Neanderthals were still alive.
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