Comet from the Oort Cloud..."Look at it with your own eyes".

[Anchor]
A comet bright enough to be seen with the naked eye will come to Earth for a week from tomorrow night (12th).It's '∀ Mountain-Atlas Comet', a comet created in the ancient Oort cloud of
.

It is said that if you pass next to the Earth this time, you will not return until 80,000 years later.

Reporter Jang Ah-young reports.

[Reporter]
A small but bright light slowly rises above the aurora-flooding horizon.

This is the Tsuzhinsan-Atlas Comet, which was taken by an astronaut at the International Space Station on the 29th of last month.

This comet comes closest to Earth on a weekend night.

It will approach about 70 million kilometers, but the brightness of the star is zero, and you can see the tail fully with the naked eye.

From tomorrow (12th), you can observe the comet in the western sky in the evening, between Venus and Akturus, for a week.

[Lee Tae-hyung / Director of Chungju Goguryo Astronomical Science Museum: Comets will be able to see comets with naked eyes from the evening sky from the 12th when they come closest to Earth. [It's the first time in 4 years that we can see such a bright comet in Korea since the Neowise comet in 2020.]

The original name of the Tsuzhinshan-Atlas comet is C/2023 A3 (C Yi Gong-sam A3), which was first discovered at the Tsuzhinshan Observatory in Nanjing, China, in January last year and at the Atlas Telescope in South Africa in February.

Beyond Pluto, comets that originated from the Oort cloud are frozen rocks when the solar system formed billions of years ago.

It passed the closest point to the sun on the 27th of last month, and it survived intact, contrary to concerns that it could not withstand solar heat and gravity because it was composed of ice and carbon monoxide.

The long-tracked comet will visit Earth again 80,000 years later if it survives in space.

I'm YTN's Jang Ayoung.


Video editing: Lee Young-hoon
Design: Ji Kyung-yoon