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Returning from touching the Sun, Comet Tzuchinshan-Atlas will be visible across the northern hemisphere starting Saturday evening and for “about ten days,” following the path of a journey that began millions of years ago.
The celestial body, whose exact name is C/2023 A3, could be observed with the naked eye from late September to early October in the tropics and southern half of the planet.
The comet was discovered on Friday evening in North America, Eric Lagadec, an astrophysicist at the Côte d’Azur Observatory in southern France, told AFP.
Previously, “we couldn’t observe it when it was between the Earth and the Sun,” he said. There it was on the verge of extinction as it was hit by a solar storm that reached Earth on Thursday and caused the northern lights.
As comets approach the Sun, the ice in their cores sublimates, that is, goes directly from a solid to a gas, releasing a long trail of dust that reflects light and releasing gases as it does so.
During this process, a characteristic cloud called a coma forms around the nucleus, and the comet risks disintegrating.
The small body of rock and ice was first discovered in January 2023 by China’s Purple Mountain Observatory (Zuchinshan), and its existence was confirmed by a telescope from South Africa’s Atlas program.
Starting this Saturday, it will be visible across the northern hemisphere for “about ten days” when looking west and “a little higher” in the sky each night, Lagadec said.
However, “every day will be a little less bright” as it moves away from the Sun, he explained.
Unless there are obstacles that change its trajectory, Tsuchinshan Atlas will not return close to Earth for another 80,000 years, a comet expert has concluded.
Based on its orbit and some models, it is estimated that it may have traveled 400,000 times the distance between Earth and the Sun before reaching us.
It’s a journey of millions of years for this comet, which was likely born in the Oort cloud, a bubble at the edge of the solar system where tiny planets and celestial bodies are hypothesized to reside.
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