There's a new comet in town and you don't need a fancy multi-million-dollar telescope to see it. Just regular eyeballs
(2020/05/15)
- Reference: 1589502487
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/15/swan_comet_eyesight/
- Source link:
The venerable Solar Heliospheric Observatory (SOHO), run by NASA and ESA, has discovered a new comet visible right now with the naked eye from Earth's southern hemisphere.
As [1]SOHO scanned the heavens for sources of ultraviolet light, the orbiting telescope clocked a bright blob moving through the Solar System.
That blob is a comet, which is shedding water vapor from its icy core as it's melted by the Sun's heat. The solar radiation is also splitting the liquid into hydrogen atoms and hydrogen-oxygen pairs. The cloud of hydrogen atoms emitted a type of ultraviolet radiation called Lyman-alpha light that's visible to the satellite's Solar Wind ANisotropies ( [2]SWAN ) instrument.
Amateur astronomer Michael Mattiazzo spotted the comet – named C/2020 F8, or SWAN after the instrument – after spotting it hurtling by Earth in April using publicly available data from the probe.
[3]
Arrow pointing to comet SWAN detected by the SOHO probe... Image credit: ESA/NASA/SOHO
Professor Michael Combi, of the University of Michigan’s Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering department and a member of the SWAN team, estimated that by April 15 the space rock was spewing about 1,300 kilograms of water vapor per second.
"This is already three times more than Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko at its best, when it was visited by ESA's Rosetta mission between 2014 and 2016," [4]said Jean-Loup Bertaux, former principal investigator and proposer of the SWAN instrument.
ATLAS flubbed: Comet heading our way takes one look at Earth, self-destructs into house-sized chunks [5]READ MORE
Although the comet made its closest approach on May 13 when it was about 53 million miles from Earth, it should [6]stay visible throughout the end of May and into June. The best time to catch it is just before sunrise in the southern hemisphere; the object should be bright enough to be spotted with the naked eye.
Comet SWAN is the 3,932nd ice ball clocked using SOHO, an admirable achievement for the 25-year-old satellite considering it was planned to operate for just two years to map solar winds. Most of those discoveries, however, were made using its coronagraph instrument that studies the Sun’s outer shell while blocking out its central sunlight.
“It's extremely exciting that our sun-watching observatory has spotted so many comets since its launch in 1995," said Bernhard Fleck, ESA SOHO project scientist. "We are eagerly awaiting, along with comet enthusiasts around the world, for the 4,000th discovery, which might happen real soon."
That job has mostly been fulfilled by armchair astronomers scrolling through images taken from SOHO and NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) as part of the online [7]Sungrazer Project .
“Almost all of SOHO's comet discoveries so far have been made by citizen scientists scouring images returned by SOHO's LASCO instrument," said Karl Battams, a lead researcher on the project and a comet expert at the US Naval Research Laboratory. ®
Sponsored: [8]Forrester Build a Digital Experience Portfolio
[1] https://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/
[2] http://swan.projet.latmos.ipsl.fr/
[3] https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/05/14/comet_swan.gif
[4] https://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/hotshot/index.html/
[5] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/04/29/atlas_comet_shards/
[6] https://theskylive.com/c2020f8-info#riseset
[7] https://sungrazer.nrl.navy.mil/
[8] https://go.theregister.co.uk/tl/1936/-8554/forrester-build-a-digital-experience-portfolio?td=wptl1936
As [1]SOHO scanned the heavens for sources of ultraviolet light, the orbiting telescope clocked a bright blob moving through the Solar System.
That blob is a comet, which is shedding water vapor from its icy core as it's melted by the Sun's heat. The solar radiation is also splitting the liquid into hydrogen atoms and hydrogen-oxygen pairs. The cloud of hydrogen atoms emitted a type of ultraviolet radiation called Lyman-alpha light that's visible to the satellite's Solar Wind ANisotropies ( [2]SWAN ) instrument.
Amateur astronomer Michael Mattiazzo spotted the comet – named C/2020 F8, or SWAN after the instrument – after spotting it hurtling by Earth in April using publicly available data from the probe.
[3]
Arrow pointing to comet SWAN detected by the SOHO probe... Image credit: ESA/NASA/SOHO
Professor Michael Combi, of the University of Michigan’s Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering department and a member of the SWAN team, estimated that by April 15 the space rock was spewing about 1,300 kilograms of water vapor per second.
"This is already three times more than Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko at its best, when it was visited by ESA's Rosetta mission between 2014 and 2016," [4]said Jean-Loup Bertaux, former principal investigator and proposer of the SWAN instrument.
ATLAS flubbed: Comet heading our way takes one look at Earth, self-destructs into house-sized chunks [5]READ MORE
Although the comet made its closest approach on May 13 when it was about 53 million miles from Earth, it should [6]stay visible throughout the end of May and into June. The best time to catch it is just before sunrise in the southern hemisphere; the object should be bright enough to be spotted with the naked eye.
Comet SWAN is the 3,932nd ice ball clocked using SOHO, an admirable achievement for the 25-year-old satellite considering it was planned to operate for just two years to map solar winds. Most of those discoveries, however, were made using its coronagraph instrument that studies the Sun’s outer shell while blocking out its central sunlight.
“It's extremely exciting that our sun-watching observatory has spotted so many comets since its launch in 1995," said Bernhard Fleck, ESA SOHO project scientist. "We are eagerly awaiting, along with comet enthusiasts around the world, for the 4,000th discovery, which might happen real soon."
That job has mostly been fulfilled by armchair astronomers scrolling through images taken from SOHO and NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory (STEREO) as part of the online [7]Sungrazer Project .
“Almost all of SOHO's comet discoveries so far have been made by citizen scientists scouring images returned by SOHO's LASCO instrument," said Karl Battams, a lead researcher on the project and a comet expert at the US Naval Research Laboratory. ®
Sponsored: [8]Forrester Build a Digital Experience Portfolio
[1] https://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/
[2] http://swan.projet.latmos.ipsl.fr/
[3] https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/05/14/comet_swan.gif
[4] https://sohowww.nascom.nasa.gov/hotshot/index.html/
[5] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/04/29/atlas_comet_shards/
[6] https://theskylive.com/c2020f8-info#riseset
[7] https://sungrazer.nrl.navy.mil/
[8] https://go.theregister.co.uk/tl/1936/-8554/forrester-build-a-digital-experience-portfolio?td=wptl1936
I'd like to see it
beep54
But not only am I in the wrong hemisphere, I'm in the middle of Austin. We see no stars at all. Just the Moon, Venus, possibly Mars and maybe, just maybe Jupiter at times. That's it.
This is not visible
Dr AntiSol, astrophysicist
I was trying to get a look at this a couple of weeks ago, when it was still above the horizon.
I'm not sure where The Reg is getting their info (or maybe somebody's not paying attention), but according to all the info I have this is no longer visible as it's dropped below the horizon. I'm at about -40S and it hasn't been visible for about a week IIRC. Even the site that the article links to says that it rises for me at 06:30 and sets at 15:00, which are... not ideal astronomical observing conditions.
Citizen Boffins
Cheers to NASA, ESA, and the citizen boffins who spotted this.
But from what I've read, don't expect to see a traditional comet image like the one heading El Reg's article. It will probably just look like a fuzzy star.
For a detailed analysis see: https://www.space.com/comet-swan-may-be-dimming.html