Once-in-a-160000-year comet G3 ATLAS could shine as bright as Venus next week.

The brightest comet in nearly 20 years — comet G3 ATLAS (C/2024) — is expected to reach its peak brilliance later this week into early next week.

The only question is: "Will you actually be able to see it?"

This celestial paradox belongs to Comet 2024 G3 (ATLAS), which was first sighted on April 5 of last year by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) survey, in images obtained with a 0.5-meter (19.7-inch) reflector telescope located in Rio Hurtado, Chile. At the time of discovery, the comet was 407 million miles (655 million km) from Earth and shining at an exceedingly faint magnitude of +19. That's roughly 158,000 times dimmer than the faintest star visible to the naked eye.

A preliminary orbit for this comet indicated that it was going to pass exceptionally close — less than 9 million miles (14 million km) from the sun in mid-January 2025; only about one-quarter the distance of Mercury, the closest planet to the sun. However, these initial calculations also suggested that G3 ATLAS was a new comet coming directly from out of the Oort cloud, a vast bubble composed of countless billions of icy objects encircling our solar system, located perhaps 10 trillion miles (16 trillion km) from the sun. Small sun-skirting comets originating from the Oort Cloud, making their first approach to the sun, often disintegrate before reaching perihelion (their closest approach to the sun).

But after G3 ATLAS’s orbit was refined, it was determined that it was actually a dynamically old comet, having made at least one previous close approach to the sun, with an orbital period of roughly 160,000 years. This provided hope that — having survived a prior close encounter with the sun — this comet could survive its impending close brush and possibly put on a bright display after the start of the new year.

Source: www.space.com

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