Space News: Comet McNaught Will Light Up At Sunrise And Sunset

Elaine Meinel Supkis

A new comet has appeared on the horizon. Comet McNaught just may be one of the biggest celestial events in a long time, we don't know. It bears close watching.

&hearts Because the comet has been faint up to now, the public hasn't heard much exciting news bulletins about this.

The brightest comet in decades is unexpectedly now visible. The most optimistic predictions have Comet McNaught (C/2006 P1) shortly becoming one of the brightest comets of the past century. For the next few days, its short tail and bright coma can be spotted with the unaided eye close to the Sun and near the horizon in both evening and morning skies.

So, it rises and sets with the sun? Doesn't this mean it is flying through the planetary plane? Namely, it isn't falling from other orientations but rather will fly past the orbits of the planets? Ones that do this usually disintegrate if it gets yanked around by the gravity pools of various planets. &hearts Just like we saw so spectacularly in 1994 when Shoemaker-Levy was torn to pieces before slamming into Jupiter.

I remember the debate about comets. Many astronomers thought they were made of ice. When this one broke apart and then created gigantic disturbances and explosive reactions when it hit Jupiter, the snowball theory fell apart, too. Since then, probes have shown us, comets are really very old material from the beginning of the universe and are made of all sorts of minerals, actually, we know very little about them because I suspect, they are all sorts of stuff, space junk. Part of the envelope around our little star. And I also suspect this stuff is part of the globular cluster that our star was part of long before it came close to the Milky Way.

Ergo: comets are important things to study. On top of this scientific interest, there is the need for self-preservation: these things are terribly dangerous and can wipe us out! So we have to always scan the heavens and our space programs should have a strong element of work towards deali with the possibility of a planetary impact.

Years ago, a movie was made about this and of course, showed the USA as the saviors of the earth while grateful people in third world countries applauded us. I wish this could be this way.

&hearts I believe this is the same comet in 2005:

Comet McNaught in that day has been positioned in lower south west evening skies in the constellation of Capricornus. The comet has a dimmed coma with a brightness of about 11th magnitude and thin tail stretched toward south east. It's estimated that the comet will move to north east, and brightened about 10th magnitude in Jan from Mar 2006.

I remember comet Neat which came galloping out of the Pegasus quadrant. &hearts Click here to download the very interesting path this comet took as it brushed by the sun. Astronomers were very surprised to see the sun blast out three times, big coronal ejections that nearly enfolded Neat at one point. We still don't understand what happened back then. Some comets plow into the sun. Considering how small they are, it is interesting how much they disturb the sun just like a comet much smaller than the moon, caused a great deal of disturbance on the biggest of the gas giants.

&hearts Astronomers still hold, comets are water and methane but they do concede there is rock there, too.

Right now, predictions are that it should be rather bright near its closest to the Sun. But how bright remains open to question. Some are calling for it to be several dozen times brighter than Venus, and others are precting a magnitude no brighter than the North Star. It is really very hard to predict what an unknown comet will do. Comets that come by regularly, we observe and get an idea of what to expect. But this comet has never been seen before. In fact, this is probably the fist and only time that this comet has been by close to the Sun. With an eccentricity currently estimated to be just over 1 it will never again come by. First time comets are notoriously unreliable, and are often a bit dimmer than the ones that have been by a few times. That might seem counterintuitive, since the first time by they should have the most volatiles. But, perhaps impacts, fractures and so forth expose more fresh material in more frequent comets.

We know very little about these mysterious objects. We don't know where they come from, why they appear suddenly or what their dynamics are. Gathering data does help us 'see' them much better and their history of destruction requires us to study them most closely. We can't stop the sun from doing things to us, we can't stop other stars from blasting stuff at us but we can stop comets from destroying our planet. This being a thing that is possible for us means we are responsible to do something.

Until then, enjoy the amazing views at sunrise and sunset. I will try to take pictures but don't really have a good camera right now.

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