Jakarta, CNNIndonesia —
An image taken by an observer astronomy from Austria showing the missing tail of the green comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF).
Veteran astrophotographer Michael Jäger snapped this image of Comet ZTF on Tuesday (January 17) after driving 800 kilometers from Austria to Bavaria, Germany, for a clear view of the night sky.
Jäger later shared the image on Twitter along with another video of the comet’s photos.
“The trip was not in vain,” Jäger told Space via e-mail.
When capturing images of the comet, he said, an astrophotographer wasted no time because the comet’s appearance changes rapidly as it reaches the warmer regions of the inner solar system.
This image reveals what astronomers call a tail breaking event.
quoted SpaceWeather.comthe disruption to this tail is most likely caused by turbulent space weather, namely the solar wind that is stronger than usual that is emitted during coronal mass ejection (CME).
CMEs are bursts of high-energy particles from the sun’s upper atmosphere, the corona, that traverse the solar system and can disrupt the atmospheres of planets and other bodies.
“A piece of Comet ZTF’s tail was caught and carried away by the solar wind,” he wrote SpaceWeather.com.
“CME hitting a comet can cause magnetic reattachment to the comet’s tail, sometimes tearing it completely,” the statement continued.
Comet tails are made of evaporating gas and dust that is ejected by an icy body as it heats up close to the sun.
The width of the comet is usually no more than a few miles (1 mile = 1.6 km) wide. However, its tail can stretch for hundreds of thousands of miles across the inner solar system, providing an unusual celestial spectacle that fascinates astronomers and astrophotographers.
SpaceWeather.com added that several CMEs have passed Comet ZTF this month because its visit to this region of our solar system coincided with a spike in activity on the sun’s surface.
C/2022 E3 (ZTF ) was discovered by the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) at the Palomar Observatory in California in March 2022, making its first closest approach to Earth in about 50,000 years.
The comet will be visible to the naked eye soon, experts say, and will reach its closest approach to Earth on February 1, hurtling past our planet about a quarter of the solar-Earth distance.
Jäger, who has photographed more than 1,100 comets since he studied astrophotography four decades ago, said the weather in this part of Europe this year wasn’t ideal for this rare celestial encounter.
“The weather in Central Europe was terrible and I had to travel a lot to see comets,” Jäger wrote.
(can/arh)
