Stunning Fluorescent Green Comet ZTF Makes Its Closest Approach to Earth

23
Stunning Fluorescent Green Comet ZTF Makes Its Closest Approach to Earth
Stunning Fluorescent Green Comet ZTF Makes Its Closest Approach to Earth

Africa-Press – Cape verde. Astronomers have long suspected that comets, which are rich in organic molecules, could have seeded life on Earth and other moons and planets across the galaxy. The icy, rocky objects lurk in the solar system’s furthest reaches, only passing this way once in many thousands of years.

Comet ZTF hasn’t paid Earth a visit in roughly 50,000 years, but don’t fret, because now is the time to see it. The comet is set to make its closest pass to our planet on Wednesday.

With an apparent magnitude of +5, Comet ZTF is visible to the naked eye, but only in darker skies. It will appear in northern skies in the predawn morning, to the left of Polaris. The comet will be about 26 million miles from Earth, or roughly one-third the distance from the Earth to the sun.

As it reached its closest point to the sun, which was just outside Earth’s orbit, astrophotographers watching the event in real time captured stunning images of its tail at its largest and brightest.

Much ado has been made about the bright-green glow from the comet’s nucleus. Timothy Schmidt, a professor of chemistry, molecules and space at the University of New South Wales in Australia, explained why in a Twitter post earlier this week. So the comet is glowing for the same reason a neon light does: it’s being energized by an outside source, in this case, the sun’s rays.

Schmidt worked on a team that uncovered this property of C2 in a 2021 study aimed at finding out why comets’ heads often glow green. They found that when bombarded with a laser, C2 split from a larger carbonate molecule and glowed, but then quickly broke apart into individual carbon atoms. This, they said, is why comets’ heads glow green but not their tails, which are bits of the comet being blown away by the Sun’s rays.

For More News And Analysis About Cape verde Follow Africa-Press

LEAVE A REPLY

Please enter your comment!
Please enter your name here