Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS over ESO Supernova Planetarium in Munich, Germany

Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS over ESO Supernova Planetarium in Munich, Germany

Earth has a majestic new visitor. Seen last week above the European Southern Observatory (ESO) Supernova Planetarium & Visitor Center, the comet C/2023 A3, also known as Tsuchinshan-ATLAS, comes to us from the distant Oort Cloud—a gigantic cluster of icy objects that envelops the Solar System. As it got closer to the Sun, it heated up and developed tails of dust and gas observed by comet watchers around the world, including at the ESO Headquarters in Munich, Germany. 

The comet was first detected in early 2023 by two independent facilities: the Tsuchinshan observatory in China and a telescope from the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS), located in South Africa. Since then, it has been getting closer, reaching its closest distance to the Sun in September 2024. Its brightness peaked in early October, and the comet is now dimming down as it embarks on a long journey back home.

This object is one of the brightest comets of the last two decades, and it was easily visible to the naked eye. In this time-lapse video, hundreds of frames were taken every few seconds with different cameras and lenses to produce the sped-up video seen here.

C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS) is a comet from the solar system's Oort cloud discovered by the Purple Mountain Observatory east of Nanjing, China, on January 9, 2023, and independently found by the automated Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) in South Africa on February 22, 2023. ATLAS is funded by NASA's planetary defense office, and developed and operated by the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy. C/2023 A3 passed perihelion (closest approach to the Sun) at a distance of 0.39 AU (58 million km; 36 million miles) on September 27, 2024.

The Oort cloud is theorized to be a vast cloud of icy planetesimals surrounding the Sun at distances ranging from 2,000 to 200,000 AU (0.03 to 3.2 light-years). The concept of such a cloud was proposed in 1950 by the Dutch astronomer Jan Oort, in whose honor the idea was named. Oort proposed that the bodies in this cloud replenish and keep constant the number of long-period comets entering the inner Solar System—where they are eventually consumed and destroyed during close approaches to the Sun.

Credit: European Southern Observatory (ESO)/L. Calçada, F. Kamphues, J. C. Muñoz-Mateos, B. Speet
Duration: 22 seconds
Release Date: Oct. 21, 2024

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