Comet Tsuchinshan-Atlas over Italy's Dolomite Mountains

Comet Tsuchinshan-Atlas over Italy's Dolomite Mountains

Comet Tsuchinshan-Atlas is now headed back to the outer Solar System. The massive dusty snowball put on quite a show during its trip near the Sun, resulting in many impressive pictures from planet Earth during October 2024. This image was taken in mid-October and shows a defining visual feature of the comet—its impressive anti-tail. The image captures Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS) with impressively long dust and ion tails pointing up and away from the Sun, while the strong anti-tail—composed of more massive dust particles—trails the comet and points down and (nearly) toward the recently-set Sun. 

In the foreground is village of Tai di Cadore, Italy, with the Dolomite Mountains in the background. Another comet, C/2024 S1 (ATLAS), once a candidate to rival Comet Tsuchinshan-Atlas in brightness, broke up last week during its close approach to our Sun.

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 & Copyright: Alessandra Masi
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Release Date: Nov. 6, 2024

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