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According to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab. a green comet in February is set to go by Earth for the first time since the Stone Age.
The comet, named C/2022 E3 (ZTF), is expected to be about 26 million miles from Earth on February 2, according to the NBC affiliate KXAN.
That would be the closest the comet has actually been to the Earth in 50,000 years.
Back then, a period known as the Upper Paleolithic period, was when human beings are thought to have actually left Africa and settled in Asia and Europe.
Astronomers first spotted the comet in March, according to a news release from NASA.
“The new long-period comet has brightened substantially and is now sweeping across the northern constellation Corona Borealis in predawn skies,” NASA said in a news release December 24. “It’s still too dim to see without a telescope though.”
NASA, which described the brightness of comets as “notoriously unpredictable,” said that by February 2, C/2022 E3 (ZTF) could be “only just visible to the eye in dark night skies.”
The comet has a “greenish coma, short broad dust tail, and long faint ion tail,” according to NASA.
According to NASA, the comet can be noticeable to individuals in the Northern Hemisphere in predawn skies with binoculars or a telescope in dark, clear skies throughout January.
The outlet mentioned specialists saying the comet more than likely came from the Oort Cloud, the farthest area of the planetary system, which quoted by NASA resembles a “big, thick-walled bubble made of icy pieces of space debris the sizes of mountains and sometimes larger.”
