Magnitude +6 is roughly the lower limit of what the naked eye can see, although real-world factors such as levels of light pollution and local weather can play a role in determining whether or not an object will actually be visible unaided at a given location. Heritage Space/Heritage Images/Getty Images Halley's Comet is the only known short-period comet that is regularly visible to the naked eye from Earth. The head of Halley's Comet as photographed on by George Willis Ritchey using the 60-inch telescope at Mount Wilson Observatory, California. For example, an object with magnitude +2 is brighter than one that has a magnitude of +8. When measuring the brightness of astronomical objects, the brighter a given object is, the lower its magnitude. "If the comet has a large nucleus, and lots of dust, it will reflect more sunlight and appear brighter," Jessica Lee, an astronomer with the Royal Observatory Greenwich in the U.K., told Newsweek. This process forms a glowing atmosphere around the comet's nucleus, known as a coma-which, in the case of C/2022 E3 (ZTF), appears green-and two vast tails of gas and dust.įor a comet to reach naked-eye brightness, it must approach close to the Earth or sun, while being sufficiently large. Sometimes referred to as "cosmic snowballs," these objects are blasted with increasing amounts of radiation as they approach our star, releasing gases and debris. But when might the next naked-eye comet appear following this event-and are astronomers even able to predict such phenomena?Ĭomets are astronomical objects made up of frozen gasses, dust and rock that orbit the sun. Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF) is garnering increasing interest as it approaches Earth, with the object on the cusp of being visible to the naked eye under ideal conditions.
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