In recent months, excitement has been gradually building regarding the approach of a new comet nicknamed Tschingshan Atlas, officially classified as C/2023 A3.
Comet Tsuchinchan-ATLAS (C/2023 A3) It was first spotted on January 9, 2023 at the Xuyi Observatory of the Purple Mountain Observatory in China, then went missing, before being spotted a second time 44 days later at the Asteroid Terrestrial Impact Last Warning System (ATLAS) Observatory in Sutherland, South Africa. Run High It is predicted that by fall 2024, it will become an object bright enough to be seen with the naked eye.
but New Technical Papers Far from captivating, comet 6/10/2016 will likely disintegrate and disappear before it even makes it around the Sun in late September, according to a report released by leading comet experts on July 9.
The report was written by Dr. Zdenek Sekanina, a former NASA/JPL employee and expert on fragmentation and dissolution. CometIn his report, Dr Sekanina gives three main reasons why he believes the comet has almost disappeared:
“The purpose of this paper is not to disappoint comet watchers who are looking forward to a new object visible to the naked eye in October, but to present scientific arguments that do not appear to support such expectations,” Sekanina wrote. Predicting the breakup of a comet before its closest approach to Earth is a Sun (Perihelion) is “certainly a very risky endeavor,” but Dr. Sekinina feels “the time has come to do it.”
Comet 6/6A/ATLAS is predicted to reach perihelion on September 27, at a distance of 36 million miles (58 million kilometers) from the Sun, which is equal to the Sun’s average distance. Mercurythe closest planet to our star.
If you want to see Comet Tsingshan-Atlas this year (if it’s intact!), The best telescope and The best binoculars It’s a great starting point. If you want to take some great photos of the night sky, How to photograph a cometor recommended The best cameras for astrophotography and The best lenses for astrophotography.
Who do we believe?
Dr. Sekanina is highly respected in the astronomy community, so what he says carries a lot of weight within the community, yet his thoughts about the approaching comet’s future are met with belief and certainty mixed with skepticism and uncertainty.
One person who had high hopes for the Tuchinshan Atlas satellite’s impressive observations but who appears to have changed his mind in response to Sekanina’s conclusions is Joseph Marcus, a pathologist with a longstanding interest in comets. As a medical resident at Washington University in St. Louis, Marcus founded and edited the Comet News Service, a quarterly magazine published by the McDonnell Planetarium from 1975 to 1986. In an email to Space.com, Marcus wrote:
“The case made by Sekanina is strong. Even if, although unlikely, C/2023 A3 survived until perihelion, it would still increase in brightness to nearly 7 magnitudes” (corresponding to a brightness increase of about 600 times). “But this is now moot. I am betting on the collapse as Sekanina now claims, and I firmly follow him. After all, the comet will soon be gone,” he added.
But some people are still not convinced.
Nick James, head of comets at the British Astronomical Society, said Sekanina’s paper was “interesting” but that he didn’t find evidence of non-gravitational acceleration. “To me, this doesn’t look like a comet that’s breaking up,” he said.
Another skeptic is Dr. Clay Sherrod of the Arkansas Observatory at Mount Petitjean: “The comet isn’t going anywhere. In my opinion, it’s not ‘splitting’ and it’s all good,” he says.
Looks “healthy”
I agree with Dr. Sherrod and Mr. James, Taras PrystavskiAn amateur astronomer living in Lviv, Ukraine, he enjoys photographing various celestial objects, including comets. He posted a rendered image of the Tutinshan Atlas to Space.com on July 9, commenting, “The comet looks healthy to me. In some images, the ion tail is also visible, but it is very faint. We know that the appearance of the ion tail is an indication of a healthy cometary nucleus, so there is a slight hope that we may see some great spectacle in the fall.”
Finally, Daniel Green of the Central Bureau of Electronic Telegraphs (CBET) writes cautiously: “The comet appears to be in good health, with an ion tail now visible. We don’t see any evidence that the comet is breaking up, so we’ll just have to wait and see. We’ll know by late September (or a little earlier) whether it will be a pretty comet in October.”
It’s hard to predict the future!
The late, great baseball sage Yogi Berra once said, “It’s hard to predict anything, especially the future.” And that certainly rings true when it comes to trying to predict what a new comet will bring.
It is true that the brightness of Comet Tschingshan/Atlas remained almost constant at magnitude +10.5 from mid-April to the end of June, but its brightness ( Comet Observation Database/COBS) has begun to recover gradually through the first half of July.
Viewed through a telescope, the comet’s dusty head, or coma, has expanded to a linear diameter of about 180,000 miles (290,000 km), with a tail that is about 1 million miles (1.6 million km) long. Unfortunately for observers in the Northern Hemisphere, the comet is approaching too close to the light of the Sun to be visible; only those living south of the equator will be able to observe its progress over the next few weeks.
The comet is currently about 158 million miles (254 million km) from the Sun, with a temperature of about -150°F (-100°C). It’s now starting to cross the “waterline,” where frozen gases sublimate into steam. If the comet survives until perihelion on September 27 (which Dr. Sekanina doesn’t expect to happen), it will be exposed to temperatures of over 1,000°F (1,600°C).
Hot tea analogy
Imagine this: Here we have material that likely dates back to the birth of our solar system about 5 billion years ago, and for that entire time it has been locked up in an incredibly cold environment, with temperatures close to absolute zero. But over the next few weeks, this material will encounter increasingly hotter environments, at hundreds of degrees.
So what happens when you pour hot tea into a cold glass?
That’s what could happen to comet 6P/ATLAS in the coming weeks, as the comet breaks into pieces and possibly disintegrates entirely.
Not a foregone conclusion
This is, as Dr. Sekanina wrote in the title of his paper, “The Inevitable End” For Comet Tuchinshan-Atlas?
necessarily.
In November 2011, Australian amateur astronomer Terry Lovejoy determined that the nucleus was just 1,600 feet (500 meters) in diameter. Only 87,000 miles (140,000 km) From the surface of the sun. It wasn’t expected to survive, but somehow it did, and it gave us a brief, visually stunning spectacle. That’s what it may have seemed to observers in the Southern Hemisphere (although shortly thereafter, Comet Lovejoy actually disintegrated back into space after orbiting the Sun).
Then in 1996, a comet that was being touted as a spectacular “not to be missed” spectacle was approaching the Sun when suddenly, for some inexplicable reason, it stopped brightening from the first week of July all the way through mid-October. Then, all of a sudden, the comet returned to its orbit and began to brighten, only to fade again by mid-November. Some were very worried that the comet would be a dud, but by the spring of 1997, all fears were put to rest as the comet matured into a beautiful celestial spectacle.
What is the name of the comet? Hale-Bopp.
So maybe Yogi was right in predicting the future. teeth It’s difficult. And perhaps, as Daniel Green suggests, the only thing we can do now is to take a “wait and see” attitude as to what happens to the Tszynski Atlas in the coming days and weeks: it may fall apart, as Dr. Sekanina predicts, but for now it is still whole and sound.
And for that, let me close by quoting Yogism.
“It’s not over until it’s over!”
Joe Rao is from New York. Hayden PlanetariumHe writes about astronomy. Natural History Magazine, Agriculture Yearbook and other publications.
