Exotic Green Comet Not Seen Since Stone Age Returns To Skies Above Earth 50
An exotic green comet that has not passed Earth since the time of the Neanderthals has reappeared in the sky ready for its closest approach to the planet next week. The Guardian reports: Discovered last March by astronomers at the Zwicky Transient Facility at the Palomar Observatory in California, comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) was calculated to orbit the sun every 50,000 years, meaning it last tore past our home planet in the stone age. The comet, which comes from the Oort cloud at the edge of the solar system, will come closest to Earth on Wednesday and Thursday next week when it shoots past the planet at a distance of 2.5 light minutes -- a mere 27m miles.
Comets are balls of primordial dust and ice that swing around the sun in giant elliptical orbits. As they approach the sun, the bodies warm up, turning surface ice into gas and dislodging dust. Together, this creates the cloud or coma which surrounds the comet's hard nucleus and the dusty tail that stretches out behind. Images already taken of comet C/2022 E3 reveal a subtle green glow that is thought to arise from the presence of diatomic carbon -- pairs of carbon atoms that are bound together -- in the head of the comet. The molecule emits green light when excited by the ultraviolet rays in solar radiation.
Since mid-January, the comet has been easier to spot with a telescope or binoculars. It is visible in the northern hemisphere, clouds permitting, as the sky darkens in the evening, below and to the left of the handle of the Plough constellation. It is heading for a fly-by of the pole star, the brightest star in Ursa Minor, next week. The window for spotting the comet does not stay open long. While the best views may be had about February 1 and 2, by the middle of the month the comet will have dimmed again and slipped from view as it hurtles back out into the solar system on its return trip to the Oort cloud.
Comets are balls of primordial dust and ice that swing around the sun in giant elliptical orbits. As they approach the sun, the bodies warm up, turning surface ice into gas and dislodging dust. Together, this creates the cloud or coma which surrounds the comet's hard nucleus and the dusty tail that stretches out behind. Images already taken of comet C/2022 E3 reveal a subtle green glow that is thought to arise from the presence of diatomic carbon -- pairs of carbon atoms that are bound together -- in the head of the comet. The molecule emits green light when excited by the ultraviolet rays in solar radiation.
Since mid-January, the comet has been easier to spot with a telescope or binoculars. It is visible in the northern hemisphere, clouds permitting, as the sky darkens in the evening, below and to the left of the handle of the Plough constellation. It is heading for a fly-by of the pole star, the brightest star in Ursa Minor, next week. The window for spotting the comet does not stay open long. While the best views may be had about February 1 and 2, by the middle of the month the comet will have dimmed again and slipped from view as it hurtles back out into the solar system on its return trip to the Oort cloud.
Real reason it's green (Score:2)
Donâ(TM)t we have any probes? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why dont we have probes on the ready for events like this? Ready to launch via Falcon Heavy on say 2 or 3 months notice. It doesnt seem unreasonable.
Re:Donâ(TM)t we have any probes? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why dont we have probes on the ready for events like this?
"Events like this" is a really nebulous target.
Going out 27 million miles on a polar trajectory on very little notice (so no time for any orbital assists) is not a generic mission. What is the probe supposed to do when it gets there? A fly-by? Collect samples and return?
It doesnt seem unreasonable.
A few billion in funding should be enough. You can take up a collection. Or you could run for public office on a promise to make funding for space probes a top priority. You'll get the space-nerd vote. Good luck.
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With today's technology, all you could hope to do is do a fly-by, possibly crash into it, and/or collect samples from the plume. Landing on it like the Hayabusa mission would be impossible because the comet is going way too fast.
In order to visit extraterrestrial objects, you don't just have to get to the same location but also to the same speed. This thing came in from way beyond Pluto so in order to catch up to its speed, you would need the same amount of energy as what you would need to... get way beyond
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We don't need to orbit, just get close enough for some good pictures, of course there will be unreachable targets but many should be reachable. https://www.esa.int/Science_Ex... [esa.int]
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How many billions are you willing to spend to get what, with high likelihood, will be photos of a rubble pile?
Is that your money, or someone else's money that you're spending?
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But we already know the plume composition by spectroscopy.
OK, spectroscopy does have the problem of interference from the Earth's atmosphere. If you're using an Earth-bound spectrograph, not one of the several space-dwelling spectrographs. And it's not so good for trace elements. But it's an awful lot cheaper.
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On the contrary, if Congress WAS getting really high every days they'd be all "Oh fuck, its time to go to SPACE boys.".
Nothing else would get funded. Just shitloads of rocketships and weed.
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ESA and JAXA are working on one. Approved in 2019 and set to fly in 2029. https://www.esa.int/Science_Ex... [esa.int]
But, instead of launching the rocket when we know a comet is coming this will wait at the Sun-Earth Lagrange Point 2. Where JWST is at if that helps place it. In that little saddle of gravity it's easy to slip off into any other direction for an intercept.
NASA did something similar in the 80's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
There was a crowd funded effort in 2014 to eek out another mission for it. G
Re:Don't we have any probes? (Score:2)
That's cool.
Its got to be kryptonite (Score:3)
Big dipper (Score:3)
"The Plough Constellation" == The Big Dipper.
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Is that near the Angel Constellation and the planet Fhloston?
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Not correct, even in America. The "Big Dipper" (the "Plough" outside America) is a component of the constellation of Ursa Major, but not the whole thing. It comprises about half of the (naked-eye visible) stars of the constellation, but only about a quarter of the sky area. Constellations have precisely defined boundaries ; asterisms don't. So more precise comparison isn't really relevant. Where those boundaries are, and how the names are spelled, were laid down in the
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The asterism (small pattern of stars) that is called "the Plough" in the UK goes by the name of "the Big Dipper" in the US, I'm told. This asterism, whatever you call it, is a component part (around half the star count, but more like 1/4 of the sky area) of the constellation "Ursa Major", which also has different names in different parts of the world.
The Inuit have another name for the Plough asterism, but I think they hav
Everybody's... (Score:4, Funny)
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Has nobody seen Maximum Overdrive? (Score:4, Funny)
Everyone batten down your kitchen appliances and put boots on your cars.
Re: Has nobody seen Maximum Overdrive? (Score:1)
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European cars already have boots. It's only American ones that go around wearing trunks.
It is an advertisement (Score:2)
Bright green, drawing a green mist behind it (Score:1)
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
Far longer ago than the stone age ... (Score:3)
The stone age lasted until 6000 years ago in some places ( as recently as 250 years ago in Australia).
The comet has been gone for fifty thousand years, an order of magnitude longer, and more like the time that humans first spread from Africa to Asia.
This is not the fault of the article's author, but the scientifically illiterate editors at the Guardian and Slashdot, who translated "Neanderthal" as "Stone age".
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The first humans - Homo erectus, whether or not they'd have been able to interbreed with us - left Africa and travelled into Asia more than 2Myr ago. Just ask the fossils at Dmanisi in Georgia (Caucasus, not US).
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Yes, I'm just complaining about yet another bad headline. It seems to be normal for headlines to be written by people who didn't understand the article.
I'm sure authors submit the article with suggested headlines, but the idiot editors feel obliged to put their own stamp on it, without understanding.
Comet was 50k years ago, which is near enough to Homo Sapiens' big migration for a sense of time-scale. But time since end of stone age is an order of magnitude (or two) less. Maybe that's all just yesterday to
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Yes, 50kyr is pretty much yesterday. It's not even enough time for a full set of Milankovich cycles. Barely one turn of the oceanic heatpump. A sixth of the endurance (so far) of the human species. (BTW, I'm a BSc, not a PhD ; the handle is a nickname I acquired on the drilling rigs, where anyone with a degree
find it here (Score:5, Informative)
Since it's apparently so difficult to post a map and all the silly newspapers write as if they're still in the age of the printing press and can't embed something online:
https://theskylive.com/c2022e3... [theskylive.com]
there's how to find it from whatever your current location is. The interactive sky chart in the first box seems the most useful.
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Then again you've got websites in *2023* that you STILL can't fucking post an image either.
How 1995 is that posting code?
The Day of the Triffids (Score:1)
Fly-by of the pole star? I don't think so. (Score:1)
I think we can safely say the comet will not be doing a fly-by of the pole star as Polaris is about 323 light years away from where the comet will be (and presumably always has been for that matter).
Anti science xistians (Score:2)
Plough (Score:2)
The Plough constellation is not visible in the United States. Not even the Plow constellation is visible. There is a similar constellation, however, known as the Big Dipper, not to be confused with the Big Bopper, whose star has long dimmed.
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Slashdot is not United States only. People in the united island kingdom do call it the plough. It's in Tolkien also Valacirca, or the plough to the hobbits. It is also the Great Bear, Ursa Major, Odin's Wain, the Wagon, and others. Of these are visible in the US.
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We (well, those of us concerned with accuracy) prefer the "West European Archipelago", because it's not one island, it's not one "kingdom", and it hasn't been "united" since it was the territory of Subglacia, when our borders stretched east of the Urals and west of St Kilda.
In Other News (Score:2)
The world ends sometime during the night
Complete coverage on our Morning Show...along with sports, traffic, and weather !
50k years? That's nothin! (Score:2)
The last time this comet came around was the Stone Age. To give an idea of how old the planet is, this comet has had time to visit Earth over 90,000 times!
I don't know if it was actually orbiting at all that far back, but that's the time scale. This uses the Wikipedia quoted age of Earth at 4.543Bn years.