A comet soaring over the northern hemisphere this week was last seen 50,000 years ago, when woolly mammoths roamed the earth
, in Pasadena, Calif., the first humans or human-like beings to have seen the object—and initially they weren’t looking for comets at all.—essentially a very sophisticated camera and computer attached to one of the telescopes at Palomar. The system is programmed to look for exotic objects outside the solar system and even the galaxy—like supernovas, emerging black holes, and pulsating stars, all of which appear as discrete points of light.
“This was a problem, where photons were falling to the ground,” he says. “We were wasting precious potential comet photons from reaching us through our data system.” For one thing there was its direction: The comet was approaching the solar system from above, at a 90-degree angle, as if it were falling down from the sky. This indicated it was not coming from the Kuiper Belt—a band of icy, rocky, comet-like bodies that circles the solar system outside the orbit of Neptune—which sends us comets that fly flat in the plane of the solar system.
C/2022 E3 is special, but it’s not alone in taking such a long time to return to us. Its 50,000-year orbit places it in the category of so-called, which typically come from the Oort cloud and take anywhere from 200 years to 1 million years to complete a single transit of the solar system.
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