• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS Appears To Be Breaking Up Ahead Of Close Approach To Earth

July 10, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

Back in May, we brought you the news that Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS) would soon be visible in the night sky, as it made a close approach to the Earth. 

Advertisement

With its closest approach to the Earth on October 12, at approximately 70.6 million kilometers (43.9 million miles), it was estimated by some that the object would be brighter even than Jupiter from Earth, and perhaps even visible at sunset.

But unfortunately – according to analysis by astronomer Zdenek Sekanina, which has not yet been peer reviewed – the comet is doomed to break apart before its close approach with Earth.



According to Sekanina, the comet shows signs of disintegrating as it heads towards its closest approach to the Sun on September 27, when it will be 58.6 million kilometers (36.4 million miles) from our star. 

As comets approach the Sun and heat up, they outgas, losing gas and later (when they are even closer to the Sun) dust, which form their trail or coma. This outgassing acts like thrusters, slightly altering the trajectory, rotation, and speed of the comet. This is termed “non-gravitational acceleration”, in that it is acceleration not produced by falling into a gravity well of objects in the Solar System. While the comet has been observed to be accelerating beyond what we would expect from gravitational forces alone, it has not brightened in the way we would expect. 

“The first issue, which was recently called attention to by I. Ferrin, is this Oort cloud comet’s failure to brighten at a heliocentric distance exceeding 2 AU, about 160 days preperihelion, accompanied by a sharp drop in the production of dust,” Sekanina writes in the paper. 

Advertisement

As comets approach the Sun closer than 2 Astronomical Units (AU) – with 1 AU being the distance of the Earth to the Sun – plasma tails are rarely seen, so it is unsurprising that the comet’s trail is found to be dust. However, the tail is unusually thin, and unusually shaped, resembling tails of comets arriving from the Oort cloud. These objects do not fare well during close approaches to the Sun, which isn’t great news for Comet C/2023 A3 as it approaches at roughly the distance of Mercury.

“The comets of this class have a tendency to disintegrate if they are intrinsically faint and depleted in dust by the time they are near 1 AU from the Sun,” he adds. “Given the perihelion distance of 0.39 AU, I expect that the object will disappear and cease to exist as an active comet before perihelion.”

While disappointing for people who want to see the object with their own eyes, it could be good news for astronomers wanting to learn more about the fate of these objects. For Sekanina, the evidence suggests that the comet is emitting large grains fairly far from the Sun, causing its acceleration without an associated coma. The largest of these emitted “blobs” could, he suggests, look like interstellar visitor ‘Oumuamua.

“Most unusual is the continuing absence of an ordinary dust tail, which means that large amounts of dry, fractured solid material do not disintegrate into microscopic dust, but stay assembled in dark and highly porous bizarre bodies that I refer to above as blobs,” he concludes. “Once they disperse in space, they are nearly impossible to detect, yet they may be omnipresent though perhaps short lived.”

Advertisement

Astronomers will continue to track the comet on its journey. It is still possible that the object will not disintegrate and will light up the sky, but if not we will still learn something interesting.

The paper is posted to pre-print server arXiv.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Bolivian president calls for global debt relief for poor countries
  2. Five Seasons Ventures pulls in €180M fund to tackle human health and climate via FoodTech
  3. Humanity’s Journey To A Metal-Rich Asteroid Launches Today. Here’s How To Watch
  4. Ancient DNA Reveals People Caught Leprosy From Adorable Woodland Critters In Medieval England

Source Link: Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS Appears To Be Breaking Up Ahead Of Close Approach To Earth

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Unethical Experiments: When Scientists Really Should Have Stopped What They Were Doing Immediately
  • The First Humans Were Hunted By Leopards And Weren’t The Apex Predators We Thought They Were
  • Earth’s Passage Through The Galaxy Might Be Written In Its Rocks
  • What Is An Einstein Cross – And Why Is The Latest One Such A Unique Find?
  • If We Found Life On Mars, What Would That Mean For The Fermi Paradox And The Great Filter?
  • The Longest Living Mammals Are Giants That Live Up To 200 Years In The Icy Arctic
  • Entirely New Virus Detected In Bat Urine, And It’s Only The 4th Of Its Kind Ever Isolated
  • The First Ever Full Asteroid History: From Its Doomed Discovery To Collecting Its Meteorites
  • World’s Oldest Pachycephalosaur Fossil Pushes Back These Dinosaurs’ Emergence By 15 Million Years
  • The Hole In The Ozone Layer Is Healing And On Track For Full Recovery In The 21st Century, Thanks To Science
  • First Sweet Potato Genome Reveals They’re Hybrids With A Puzzling Past And 6 Sets Of Chromosomes
  • Why Is The Top Of Canada So Sparsely Populated? Meet The “Canadian Shield”
  • Humans Are In The Middle Of “A Great Evolutionary Transition”, New Paper Claims
  • Why Do Some Toilets Have Two Flush Buttons?
  • 130-Year-Old Butter Additive Discovered In Danish Basement Contains Bacteria From The 1890s
  • Prehistoric Humans Made Necklaces From Marine Mollusk Fossils 20,000 Years Ago
  • Zond 5: In 1968 Two Soviet Steppe Tortoises Beat Humans To Orbiting Around The Moon
  • Why Cats Adapted This Defense Mechanism From Snakes
  • Mother Orca Seen Carrying Dead Calf Once Again On Washington Coast
  • A Busy Spider Season Is Brewing: Why This Fall Could See A Boom Of Arachnid Activity
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version