Astrophotographer publishes photo of comet C/2022 E3 with ‘broken’ tail
It’s not often that a comet comes close enough to Earth to be visible to the naked eye, but C/2022 E3 (ZTF) may soon do so. An astrophotographer has taken a photo of the comet showing its apparently broken tail.
Astronomers and photographers have been taking images of comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) for weeks. The Austrian Michael Jäger is one of them. Recently published he posted a new image of the comet on Twitter, showing that the ‘tail’ of the comet appears to have some kind of fracture or that part of the tail appears to have disappeared.
The Spaceweather website shows this break in another photo by Jäger and points to turbulent space weather in the form of the relatively strong solar wind that is responsible for this. It would mainly be caused by plasma clouds resulting from increased solar activity. These are enormous eruptions from the sun in which many charged particles are thrown into space, which can also cause the aurora borealis, for example.
Image: Michael Jäger
Jäger captured this image last Tuesday after having to drive about 800 kilometers from Austria to southern Germany to get an uninterrupted view of the sky. He tells Space.com that this trip was worth it, partly because you have to be very quick when photographing comets, as they can change quite quickly as they enter the warmer parts of the solar system.
The comet has already reached perihelion on January 12. That is the closest point to the sun in its orbit. In the coming days, ZTF will become brighter and should become visible to the naked eye, although it will not be as clear as Comet Neowise in 2020. To see ZTF, look north in the morning. On February 1, the comet is closest to Earth; the distance to the earth will then be roughly a quarter of the distance between the sun and earth.
The comet was discovered in March 2022 by astronomers at the Zwicky Transient Facility at the Palomar Observatory in California. At that time, the comet’s distance from the Sun was about 400 million miles (643 million kilometers) and it was just within the orbit of Jupiter.
In comets, the proximity to the Sun essentially boils the outer layers of the comet, causing gas and dust to burst from the icy surface, leaving a large tail of debris. The tails are created by the pressure of sunlight. Ion tails are also possible. These are formed by gas that is ionized by the light of the sun and pushed outwards by the magnetic fields in the solar wind, after which the ions fluoresce in the sunlight.