Astronomers said a newly discovered comet could be seen with the naked eye as it passed near Earth and the Sun for the first time in 50,000 years. The comet was named C/2022 E3 (ZTF) after the Zwicky Transient Facility, which saw it for the first time as it passed by Jupiter last March.

After traveling through the icy expanses of our solar system, it will make its closest approach to the Sun on January 12 and pass closest to Earth on February 1. With good binoculars it will probably be easy to spot even with the naked eye if the sky isn’t overly illuminated by city lights or the moon.

“The comet will be at its brightest when it’s closest to Earth,” Caltech physics professor Thomas Prince, who works at the Zwicky Transient Facility, told AFP. The comet, which is made of ice and dust and emits a greenish aura, is estimated to be about one kilometer in diameter, according to Paris Observatory astrophysicist Nicolas Biver.

This makes it significantly more than Comet NEOWISE, the last comet to pass near Earth with the naked eye in March 2020, and Comet Hale-Bopp, which flew about 60 kilometers in diameter in 1997 and has the potential to end life. makes it small. But Beaver said the last visit would bring him closer to Earth, and that “could make up for the fact that it wasn’t very big.” While the comet will be at its brightest when it passes Earth in early February, the full moon can make it difficult to detect.

For the Northern Hemisphere, Beaver suggested the last week of January, when the comet passes between the constellations Ursa Major and Ursa Major. According to him, the new moon on the weekend of January 21-22 is a good chance for stargazers.

“We may also be pleasantly surprised and the object may be twice as bright as we expected,” Beaver added. Another opportunity to spot the comet in the sky will pass near Mars on February 10, Prince said.

“rare guest”

According to Prince, the comet spent most of its life “at least 2,500 times further from the Sun than Earth.” The comet likely came from the Oort cloud, a theoretically huge sphere that surrounds the solar system and is home to mysterious icy objects, Beaver said. The last time a comet crossed the Earth was during the Upper Paleolithic, when Neanderthals roamed the Earth. The comet’s next visit to the inner solar system is not expected for another 50,000 years, Prince said. However, Beaver said that after this visit, the comet is likely to be “ejected from the solar system forever.”

The James Webb Space Telescope will also be among the close watchers. But Beaver said they wouldn’t take pictures rather than study the comet’s composition. The closer a comet is to Earth, the easier it is for telescopes to measure its composition, “because the Sun fuses its outer layers,” said Prince. This “rare guest” will tell us “about the inhabitants of our solar system far beyond the outermost planets,” he added.