Dan Bartlett
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Comet Leonard is captured with a green comma.
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Nationalgeographic.co.id – Comet Leonard, also known as C/2021 A1 entered Earth’s sky nearly a year after being first spotted around Jupiter in January last year.
This brightest comet that has passed through Earth, lighting up the sky for days has disintegrated and lost its important parts as it moved away from the Sun. The object hit the Sun in January this year after making its closest approach to Earth on December 12, 2021. The comet has now lost its core and coma that form a temporary atmosphere.
With the core gone, this comet has faded in brightness and could end up just as dust and gas as it continues to move in its orbit. The comet, discovered by Gregory Leonard, is now the remains of a comet that can be seen in the morning sky in the southern hemisphere.
“The legacy of A1 C/2021 is most likely the explosion-induced display of its ion tail structure. Otherworldly and awe-inspiring was the only description that came to my mind when I started looking at the images posted online by a handful of dedicated expert astrophotographers, especially after December 19, 2021, when the comet begins to experience intense periodic explosive activity,” he said. Leonard, to EarthSky.
Gregory Leonard discovered comet C/2021 A1 (Leonard) at the Mount Lemmon Observatory on January 3, 2021. At the time of its discovery, it was 750 million km from the Sun. It has a core of about 1 kilometer.
NASA / NRL / Karl Battams
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The image of the difference, which highlights the subtle changes in comet Leonard’s tail at two frames, was captured by the HI-2 telescope aboard NASA’s STEREO-A spacecraft.
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In late November 2021, astronomers wondered if the comet was starting to disintegrate. This is because they saw several signs, including fading brightness, asymmetrical shape of the comet’s head, generally the head of a comet does not appear round, and its path appears to veer off course.
After a few months, astronomers realized that the comet was not destroyed in December. I don’t know, it’s possible that the moonlight has affected the brightness of the volatile gases consumed by the comet. And when a comet goes from boiling carbon dioxide to boiling water, sometimes its brightness drops slightly. That’s what happened at the end of November 2021, wrote EarthSky.
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