Sunday, November 03, 2024
name of Prensa Latina
Bandera inglesa
English Edition
Search
Close this search box.
name of Prensa Latina

NEWS

NEWS

Comet of the century to reach its closest point to Earth

Washington, Oct 12 (Prensa Latina) The C/2023 A3 Tsuchinshan-ATLAS, known as the comet of the century, will reach its closest point to Earth today, at about 70 million kilometers, and will be visible to naked eyes.

Discovered in January 2023 by telescopes at the Tsuchinshan Observatory in China and confirmed by the ATLAS project in South Africa, this comet was so nicknamed because of its exceptional brightness and the rarity of its trajectory.

According to astronomers, it will be seen throughout the northern hemisphere as a bright fireball in the dark sky, with a long, extended tail equal to the diameter of 42 moons.

In late September the star passed close to the sun without disintegrating, a phenomenon known as perihelion.

It is estimated that it may have last passed around the sun 80,000 years ago, when Neanderthals were able to observe it.

It bears the letter C in its name because it is a non-periodic comet, i.e., with an open trajectory estimated in thousands of years.

Tsuchinshan-ATLAS comes from the Oort cloud, at the limits of the gravitational field of the solar system and its place of origin, a huge storehouse of stellar objects from which Halley´s comet arose.

This event also evokes the impressive Hale-Bopp and Hyakutake comets that almost three decades ago left an indelible mark on the memory of scientists and astronomy lovers.

jrr/jav/rgh/lpn

LATEST NEWS
RELATED