In autumn, a comet may be visible to the naked eye in the night sky. It’s a celestial body called Tsuchinshan ATLAS (C/2023 A3), which might even become as bright as Venus.
C/2023 A3 arrived in South Africa on February 22, 2023 using the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS for short), a robotic warning system specifically designed to detect near-Earth asteroids, a few weeks until a few days before their arrival. possible impact to detect Earth has been discovered.
Tsuchinshan-ATLAS was originally thought to be an asteroid, but it was later discovered that the same object had been photographed six weeks earlier by the Purple Mountain Observatory (Tsuchinshan), east of Nanjing, China.
Probably comes from the Oort cloud
C/2023 A3 probably formed in the so-called Oort cloud. This is a remote region of space that is thought to be home to trillions of comets.
Astronomers have since discovered that it is actually an incoming comet. According to calculations, it will approach within about 58 million kilometers on September 27. This also matches the average distance of the planet closest to the Sun, Mercury.
Seen in the western evening sky
Two weeks later, on October 12, Comet C/2023 A3 will be only about 45 million miles (71 million kilometers) from Earth. According to experts, the figures calculated so far indicate that the celestial body could develop a remarkable tail, which could make a striking appearance in the western evening sky by mid-October.
Source: Krone
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