Halley’s Comet comes by every 75 years or so. The comet that’s approaching us now—it will be closest to Earth between the first and second of February—visits every 50,000 years.
The last time that the green comet was visible, there were rhinoceros-size wombats living in Australia, along with some ginormous kangaroos. Though some comets swing by Earth only once, many visit periodically. Halley’s Comet comes by every seventy-five years or so. The comet that’s approaching us now—it will be closest to Earth between the first and second of February—is uncatchily named C/2022 E3 , and it visits every fifty thousand years. We didn’t know about this comet until recently.
“In this case, we found the comet in our twilight survey,” Tom Prince, one of the lead investigators of the Zwicky Transient Facility , a Caltech-led project, said. For the Z.T.F.’s night-sky surveys, the facility uses a special camera to take images through the Palomar Observatory’s forty-eight-inch telescope. It records an image of the night sky every thirty seconds or so; in the course of two nights, it collects data on the heavenly dome.
“A bright comet is always exciting,” Mike Kelley, an astronomer at the University of Maryland and a comet expert, said. The brightness is more than pretty; it allows astronomers to use spectroscopy to measure gases that are emitted. The comet’s green color is caused by diatomic carbon , but more detail can also be worked out. Detecting molecules such as chloroacetophenone and hydroxide, for example, gives clues as to the amount of water ice on the comet.
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