A comet soon visible to the naked eye
Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) was discovered by the Zwicky Transient Facility on March 2, 2022. © MICHAEL JAEGER
Text by: Simon Rozé Follow
2 mins
It's a rare sight: a comet will cross the sky between the end of January and the beginning of February.
It will be close enough to Earth to be observed without a telescope in the northern hemisphere.
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The last time she passed, towards the end of the Paleolithic, Homo Sapiens was still discovering Europe and Asia.
C/2022 E3 ZTF doesn't have the most poetic of names, but 50,000 years after its last visit, the spectacle will be moving nonetheless.
Comets are indeed special objects in the solar system.
Spending most of their time away from our star, their orbit leads them to dive in its direction before heading in the opposite direction.
During this phase, the heat of the sun melts the ice that composes them: it sublimates, creating a characteristic plume, the tail of a comet.
C/2022 E3 ZTF will be closest to Earth on February 1, at 42 million kilometers.
It is certainly far, but that will not prevent it from being visible to the naked eye, provided you are in the northern hemisphere and have a very dark sky.
It will therefore be necessary to move away from the light pollution of cities, and if possible favor observation in the middle of the night, once the moon has set.
It will then suffice to look between Ursa Minor and Ursa Major, above the North Star.
If the visibility will be maximum on February 1, it will still be possible to observe the comet the days before and after this date.
It is even visible now, provided you have a good pair of binoculars.
One last lap and then go?
About a kilometer wide,
C/2022 E3 ZTF was discovered last year
as it crossed Jupiter's orbit, plunging from the outer reaches of the solar system toward our star.
It came as close as possible to it on January 12 and is now on the opposite path.
It is also perhaps the last time that it makes this journey: benefiting from the gravitational attraction of the sun, it has been accelerated and could be propelled outside the solar system.
Such comets are not uncommon, one passes by approximately every two years, but they are not always visible to the naked eye.
However, they remain prime targets for observations, especially scientific ones.
The study of comets is indeed very interesting to better understand the origins and the formation of the solar system.
The orbit of these objects taking them very far from our star, where they spend most of their existence in the cold, they have remained almost unchanged since their formation more than 4 billion years ago.
As some comets periodically come close to Earth, these remnants can therefore easily be studied by scientists.
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Astronomy