A comet last visible from Earth when Neanderthals were walking the planet is back in the inner solar system, and you might be able to see it next month.
Comet A3, known in full as C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS), was discovered in January last year and was predicted to be potentially one of the brightest in years, with some saying it could be the ‘comet of the century’.
That excitement has dialled down somewhat, but it could still be visible to the naked eye in the Northern hemisphere from October.
It was spotted independently by two observatories, the Tsuchinshan Observatory in China, and Nasa’s Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS), after it came back our way for the first time in roughly 80,000 years.
Until now, it is thought to have been hanging out in the Oort Cloud, a giant shell or bubble of bits of icy debris surrounding the edge of our solar system.
There will be two main periods it will be visible to us in the UK, having already been seen in the southern hemisphere.
The first window is between the 27 September and 2 October, when it will be visible east just before sunrise.
There will be another chance between October 12 and 30, which will be the best chance if you look to the west just after sunset, according to the Royal Astronomical Society.
The society’s Dr Robert Massey said in a video explainer: ‘We’re all really excited about the prospect of the Comet A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) and how it might just be a nice bright object in the night sky.
‘I would think that you’re going to need a pair of binoculars to pick it out, or a telescope if you have the right kind of telescope with a wide field and you know exactly where to look.
‘But who knows, it might be visible to the naked eye as well. We’ll just have to wait and see.’
He said he personally doubted it would be as easy to see as Neowise comet was in 2020 or Hale-Bopp in the late 1990s.
But he said it was likely people would be able to get good photos of it using a long exposure, and you might even be able to just point and shoot with a mobile phone camera resting on something.
Comets are similar to asteroids in that they are solid pieces of space rock which orbit the sun but are much, much smaller than a planet.
But unlike asteroids which are made of rock and metal, comets are made of ice, rock, and gas.
It is this quality which gives them their distinctive ‘tail’, as when they are close enough to the sun for us to see them, the warmth melts some of the ice they contain which changes into gas, releasing dust particles which become visible trailing behind it.
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