The Story Behind a Once-in-a-Lifetime Green Comet That ’ s About to Fly Past Earth

There was no Palomar Observatory when the object now known as comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) made its last close approach to Earth 50,000 years ago. There were mastodons and woolly mammoths, and great swaths of glaciers covering portions of North America and northern Europe, as the planet went through its last ice age. But there were no trained skygazers. Now, the ghostly green comet, spotted last year by two modern-day astronomers working at Palomar, in southern California, is swinging back our way. This week, the comet is heading for a close approach to Earth on Feb. 1 and 2, when it will be just 43 million km (27 million mi.) from our planet and be visible to the naked eye as a bright green smudge in the northern hemisphere’s skies. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] The researchers credited with discovering C/2022 E3 (ZTF) on March 2, 2022 are Bryce Bolin, a NASA postdoctoral fellow at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., and Frank Masci, a senior scientist at Caltech, in Pasadena, Calif., the first humans or human-like beings (after the homo sapiens and Neanderthals of 50,000 years ago) to have seen the object—and initially they weren’t looking for comets at all. The ZTF in the comet’s name stands for Zwicky Transit Facility—essentially a very sophisticated camera and computer attached to one of the telescopes at Palomar. The system is programmed to look for exotic objects outside the solar system and even the galaxy—li...
Source: TIME: Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Uncategorized Space Source Type: news