After dazzling humans with its greenish tinged presence in the night sky, Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) is on its way out of the inner solar system and our lives for good. The rare comet will not be visible in the skies above Earth for the next 50,000 years as it travels out of the Solar System before beginning its journey back.
The comet had been in the skies for nearly a month since mid-January as it traveled outwards away from Earth in its orbit. The comet has an orbit that stretches about 50,000 years around the Sun. It will next return to Earth only in the year 52023 and who knows by then, humans might have completely evolved into some other species, or even left Earth to settle on another planet.
Considered to be a long-period comet, the celestial object is believed to have come from the outer reaches of the solar system, most likely the Oort Cloud. Researchers are hopeful that the comet could again be seen if the speed is not fast enough to escape the Sun’s gravity.
According to the Adler Planetarium, if its gravity is influenced by any of the planets, its orbit could turn into a hyperbolic orbit and it could gain speed and go out of the solar system for good.
“When a solar system object is weakly hyperbolic, that is, it has just enough speed that it will, after thousands of years, escape from the gravity of the Sun entirely, then even small changes in speed can change the orbit dramatically. But this works in reverse also. If an object is weakly bound, that is, the orbit is a closed ellipse, but very large, then it can be unbound and turn into a weakly hyperbolic orbit very easily as well,” Adler Planetarium astronomer, Dr. Geza Gyuk, said in a statement.
The comet was affected by the gravity of Jupiter when it was first detected by telescopes on Earth and, therefore, astronomers have pointed out that there could be a chance that due to this altered orbit, the green comet could not just go outside the inner planet, but outside our Solar System altogether.
The comet is characterised by a greenish tinge around its nucleus and tadpole-type tail that extends millions of kilometers in open space. At its closest, the comet was just 42 million kilometers from Earth’s surface, which is a very small distance on the cosmic scale. The last time it came this close to Earth, modern humans were yet to evolve and Neanderthals roamed the planet.
The green comet was discovered on March 2, 2022, by astronomers using the Zwicky Transient Facility telescope at Caltech’s Palomar Observatory in San Diego.
