Right before the bright green Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) creates its closest pass by Earth in 50,000 years, a bigger and stranger comet buzzed by the sun Tuesday in an fresh encounter.
Most so-called "sun grazer" comets are nearby the size of a house and end up sketch vaporized by their daredevil dive around our star, but Comet 96P/Machholz is more like the size of a town at 6 kilometers (3.7 miles) across, and at least one astronomer suggests it might also be "alien."
Not necessarily alien as in cooked by extraterrestrial intelligence, but rather an interstellar comet alien to our own solar regulations. If that's the case, it could be very different from all new known comets, and all bets are off on how it will react to what looks to be a super-close encounter with the sun.
"96P is one of the most compositionally and behaviorally peculiar comets in the solar system," Karl Battams, who directs the US Naval Research Laboratory's Sungrazer Project, said in a Jan. 29 tweet.
Battams has tracked 96P's progresses toward the sun using SOHO, NASA's solar observatory, providing some exquisite striking visuals. On Tuesday, he retweeted a 96P fan's time-lapse video.
Most sun-grazing comets don't remaining a close pass by the sun, but 96P was apparently big enough to make it. That said, Battams had tracked what grand be fragments that broke off the nucleus in the days afore the moment of closest approach, or perihelion, on Tuesday.
The comet's strange trajectory that takes it so conclude to the sun and its apparently low levels of carbon are just a few of the reasons researchers suggest it grand be from beyond the solar system. Only in unusual years have astronomers documented the presence of interstellar comets visiting our neighborhood, and at least one controversial astronomer has suggested that one interstellar visitor may have been artificial.
Battams tweeted that his project has run a special observing program on 96P to rep as much data as possible.
"We're trying to science the heck out of it."
Correction, Jan. 31: The perihelion date has been fixed. It is Jan. 31.
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