The Meteor and The Comet

The Meteor and The Comet

How different are these two streaks? The streak on the upper right is Comet Tsuchinshan-Atlas showing an impressive dust tail. The comet is a large and dirty iceberg that entered the inner Solar System and is shedding gas and dust as it is warmed by the Sun's light. The streak on the lower left is a meteor showing an impressive evaporation trail. The meteor is a small and cold rock that entered the Earth's atmosphere and is shedding gas and dust as it is warmed by molecular collisions. The meteor was likely once part of a comet or asteroid—perhaps later composing part of its tail. The meteor was gone in a flash and was only caught by coincidence during a series of exposures documenting the comet's long tail. This image was captured just over a month ago from Sichuan province in China.

Image Description: A star-filled sky has two streaks in the foreground. A green and red streak toward the lower left was created by an ablating meteor, while the blue and white streak on the upper right is the coma and tail of a comet.

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).

Image Credit & Copyright: Wang Hao
Processing: Song Wentao

Image Date: September 2024

Image Location: Sichuan province, China
Release Date: Nov. 27, 2024

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