Approaching New Comet Will Outshine All the Stars in the Sky Next Year@TheCosmosNews

#thecosmosnews Newly Discovered Comet Could Outshine The Brightest Stars Next Year A comet visiting the inner solar system for the first time in 80,000 years – or possibly ever – should be the best for several years, putting 2023’s “green comet” in the shade. A comet that will make a (somewhat) close approach to the Earth in September 2024 is already creating excitement among amateur astronomers. Comets are unpredictable beasts, and a great many have proven disappointing – but C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) has many of the characteristics required to put on the best display for at least a decade. Comets visit the inner solar system quite frequently, but few can be seen with the naked eye. Most are either regular visitors (short period) that have been slowly losing material on previous approaches to the Sun and don’t have enough left to be very bright. Others never get close enough to Earth to put on a show. Tsuchinshan-ATLAS passes both those tests. Its orbit is so long it there is debate as to whether it visited the inner solar system 80,000 years ago, or if it never has. At the closest approach, it will be 58 million kilometers (36 million miles) or just under 0.39 AU (Earth-Sun distance) from the Earth. Estimates for cometary brightness have a great deal more uncertainty than for its path. This is no giant object like the mega comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein. However, we can already see signs of a tail as low melting point ices sublimate to gas, even though it is still considerably further from the Sun than Jupiter. By the time Tsuchinshan-ATLAS is inside the orbit of Venus, gases will be streaming off it, taking dust with them and producing a tail that is likely to stretch a long way across the sky. How far and how bright the tail will depend greatly on the exact compositions of rock and ice that make up Tsuchinshan-ATLAS, and whether it holds together or breaks up in the scorching rays of the Sun.