Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS) from Kitt Peak in Arizona

Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS) from Kitt Peak in Arizona

A view of Comet C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan-ATLAS) from Kitt Peak National Observatory. 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).

Credit: KPNO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/J. Lockridge
Release Date: Dec. 18, 2024

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