A green-colored comet that has been hidden in the sky for months will be visible this week
A green-colored comet that has been hidden in the sky for months will be visible this week as it passes by Earth for the first time in about 50,000 years, Reuters reported, citing BTA.
It will pass by our planet at a distance of about 42.5 million km.
Called "dirty snowballs" by astronomers, comets are balls of ice, dust, and rock that typically emerge from a ring of icy material called the Oort Cloud at the outer edge of the Solar System.
Comets are composed of a solid core of rock, ice, and dust, and are covered by a thin, gaseous atmosphere of more ice and dust called a coma. They melt as they approach the Sun and release a stream of gas and dust blown from their surface by solar radiation and plasma. This is how the outward facing tail is formed.
Various gravitational forces push comets out of the Oort Cloud and into the inner part of the Solar System. They become more visible as they approach the Sun because of the heat it emits.
Observatories around the world detect less than a dozen comets a year.
This comet last passed Earth at a time when Neanderthals still inhabited Eurasia and our species was migrating out of Africa. That's when the large mammals of the Ice Age lived, such as mammoths and saber-toothed cats, and North Africa was wet, fertile and rainy.
The comet can provide data on the primordial solar system as it formed in its early stages, explained Caltech physicist Thomas Prince.
The green comet, whose official name is C/2022 E3 (ZTF), was discovered on March 2, 2022 by astronomers using the ZTF telescope at Caltech's Palomar Observatory in San Diego. Its greenish hue is due to its chemical composition - the molecules in the comet's coma are carbon-based, and when exposed to sunlight, it appears emerald.
NASA plans to observe the comet with the James Webb spacecraft.
It will pass by our planet at a distance of about 42.5 million km.
Called "dirty snowballs" by astronomers, comets are balls of ice, dust, and rock that typically emerge from a ring of icy material called the Oort Cloud at the outer edge of the Solar System.
Comets are composed of a solid core of rock, ice, and dust, and are covered by a thin, gaseous atmosphere of more ice and dust called a coma. They melt as they approach the Sun and release a stream of gas and dust blown from their surface by solar radiation and plasma. This is how the outward facing tail is formed.
Various gravitational forces push comets out of the Oort Cloud and into the inner part of the Solar System. They become more visible as they approach the Sun because of the heat it emits.
Observatories around the world detect less than a dozen comets a year.
This comet last passed Earth at a time when Neanderthals still inhabited Eurasia and our species was migrating out of Africa. That's when the large mammals of the Ice Age lived, such as mammoths and saber-toothed cats, and North Africa was wet, fertile and rainy.
The comet can provide data on the primordial solar system as it formed in its early stages, explained Caltech physicist Thomas Prince.
The green comet, whose official name is C/2022 E3 (ZTF), was discovered on March 2, 2022 by astronomers using the ZTF telescope at Caltech's Palomar Observatory in San Diego. Its greenish hue is due to its chemical composition - the molecules in the comet's coma are carbon-based, and when exposed to sunlight, it appears emerald.
NASA plans to observe the comet with the James Webb spacecraft.
" We're going to be looking for fingerprints of certain molecules that we don't have access to from Earth ," said planetary scientist Stephanie Milam of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. " Because 'James Webb' is so sensitive, we expect new discoveries. "The Green Comet can also be seen with binoculars on a clear night in the northern sky. On Monday, it appeared between the Big Dipper and the North Star. And on Wednesday, it is expected to be next to the Giraffe constellation, bordering the Ursa Major and Ursa Minor. It is important to find a remote location to avoid light pollution in populated areas.
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