At the end of January you can (with a bit of luck) observe this comet in the sky

C/2022 E3 (ZTF) was only discovered last year. The comet is currently on its way to the inner solar system. Three points about the upcoming spectacle in the night sky:

In addition to the usual naming convention, which includes the year of the comet’s discovery, C/2022 E3 has the suffix ZTF. This is thanks to the public-private observation program “Zwicky Transient Facility”, which discovered the comet in March 2022.

C/2022 E3 (ZTF) consists of ice and dust and exudes a greenish appearance. Its diameter is estimated to be about one kilometer.

This makes it significantly smaller than Neowise, the last comet visible to the naked eye, which flew past Earth in March 2020, and Hale-Bopp, which passed in 1997 with a potentially life-threatening diameter of about 60 kilometers.

However, during its visit, C/2022 E3 (ZTF) will come closer to Earth, which “could compensate for not being very large,” Nicolas Biver, an astrophysicist at the Paris Observatory, told AFP.

As early as January 12, the comet will come closest to the sun at a distance of about 166 million kilometers. On February 1, the distance to Earth will be the shortest: about 42 million kilometers.

C/2022 E3 (ZTF) is easy to recognize with good binoculars. You can probably even see it with the naked eye, provided the sky isn’t overly lit by city lights or the moon.

The comet will be brightest as it passes Earth in early February. However, on February 5, it is already full moon again, which can make spotting difficult. Astrophysicist Biver therefore recommends the last week of January for the northern hemisphere, when the comet passes between the constellations Ursa Minor and Ursa Major.

The new moon on the weekend of January 21 and 22 should therefore be a good opportunity for stargazers. And: “We might even get a nice surprise and the object might be twice as bright as expected,” Biver added to AFP.

According to the astrophysicist, another opportunity to spot the comet in the sky will be on February 10, when it will pass close to Mars.

From very, very far away! According to Thomas Prince, a physics professor at the California Institute of Technology and a fellow at the Zwicky Transient Facility, the comet has spent most of its life at a distance “at least 2,500 times farther from us than Earth is from the sun.”

The comet is thought to have originated in the Oort cloud. This is a kind of hypothetical comet cloud in the outer region of the solar system. Hypothetical because the object has not yet been directly observed. Nevertheless, their existence is considered almost certain.

Billions of tiny bodies made of rock and ice are suspected to be in the Oort cloud. The theory is that some of these small bodies are regularly deflected from their orbits and catapulted into the inner solar system. In our environment they then appear as comets.

C/2022 E3 (ZTF), for its part, passed our Earth for the last time during the Paleolithic Era, when Neanderthals still roamed the Earth. According to physics professor Prince, the comet’s next visit to the inner solar system is not expected for another 50,000 years.

(lacquer)