A comet approaching Earth could become brighter than the stars this fall

https://www.space.com/comet-tsuchinshan-atlas-fall-2024

by belter • 2 years ago

58 75 2 years ago

space.com

pixelpoet• 2 years ago

This fall

Why do we even have names for months, when people do this? The Southern hemisphere exists too, guys...

sofixa2• 2 years ago

Not to mention that fall is mostly used in American English, while British and most other Englishes (like Australian) use the correct word, autumn.

manojlds• 2 years ago

Ha ha, funny how it's neither fall nor autumn in Australia

lukan2• 2 years ago

And who has the authority to declare, what is the correct word?

netdevnet3• 2 years ago

If you want to go down the prescriptive path, a more correct word relative to "autumn" is "hærfest". Just like "fall" replaced "autumn", "autumn" replaced "hærfest".

RoyalHenOil3• 2 years ago

"Fall" (referring to leaves falling down) has been in use since Middle English, along with "spring" (referring to leaves springing up).

Why did so many English speakers stop using "fall", a proper English word with a very long history in Britain, and switch to using a French word for it instead?

For that matter, why didn't they do the same for "spring" when it is so closely linked to "fall"? It seems very silly.

robxorb3• 2 years ago

It's a reflection of a general myopia in the American psyche, which intensifies as you reach the country's center where the rest of the world is relegated to being regarded as a strange abstract construct, and either ignored, disdained, or bombed.

edflsafoiewq2• 2 years ago

The entire human race uses phrases like "this fall" and has since time immemorial. The only myopia is that American publications specifically are supposed to take place in some kind of universalizing cultural vacuum equally applicable to the whole world.

r3trohack3r4• 2 years ago

The great heliocentric conceit. The sun does not rise. Even the phrase “the sun” is heliocentric - which sun? There are many.

https://mindpop.blankenship.io/index.html

chfalck• 2 years ago

Surely you appreciate the irony of making an overly generalized claim that Americans overly generalize the rest of the world?

baxtr• 2 years ago

Barely anyone lives there!

assimpleaspossi• 2 years ago

No one goes there anymore. It's too crowded.

lionkor• 2 years ago

U.S. defaultism

belter2• 2 years ago

Aliens got it first. Shows their grasp of Solar System politics.

jiggawatts• 2 years ago

The month-day-year format drives me crazy, especially when using a cloud product.

Cloud provider: “All our servers are UTC because that’s the international standard! Adapt your code!”

Also the same cloud provider: “We print all UTC dates using US format because that’s the local standard for less than 4% of the population. Nothing outside of North America exist or even if it does.. it doesn’t matter enough for us to care to learn about ISO 8601.”

edflsafoiewq2• 2 years ago

Giving a month would still be Northern-hemisphere specific, as the article itself points out

Unfortunately, we here in the Northern Hemisphere will not be able to check on the status of Comet Tsuchinshan–ATLAS during this summer because it will be situated much too far south to be accessible with telescopes. Those living in far-southerly locations, such as Australia, New Zealand and South America, however, will be able to track it in the morning sky before sunrise.

dylan6047• 2 years ago

You know how many times I've been teased with something that will only be visible in the southern hemisphere? Maybe it's a grass is always greener on the other side, but I definitely want to spend enough time in the southern hemisphere to balance things out. Of course when I finally do get to spend time there, all the cool things will only be visible in the northern hemisphere. I swear, it's like changing lanes in traffic.

deadbabe5• 2 years ago

Very few people live in the southern hemisphere compared to the north.

IG_Semmelweiss• 2 years ago

At thought at first that the title was clickbait.

" You mean to tell me that we can see light from the edge of the universe, but we can't tell if an object will be bright (or not) when it arrives at earth ? "

Reading the article, it seems that there's materiel that will react with the faint but steady hit of sunrays. Still , with our tech and advancement, you'd think we would be able to give a reasonably accurate prediction of whether a a very large stone will continue to shine bright when it passes by earth at supersonic speeds.

ethbr17• 2 years ago

"I have an object composed of unknown materials, jumbled together in an unknown way, with unknown density. I'm going to hold it next to a light and heat source. How bright would it be?"

That sounds like a difficult problem.

deadbabe5• 2 years ago

Not really. You just need good data or approximations of the data. Then just compute.

phyzome• 2 years ago

A big part of the question is whether it will still be offgassing enough to produce a bright coma.

malfist• 2 years ago

It all depends on how much ice is in the comet.

konstantinua00• 2 years ago

it's not the stone that shines, but cloud around it

and we can't even precisely predict cloud formation more than week or two in advance right in our face - on Earth

so no wonder comets are unpredictable

kloch• 2 years ago

I remember Hale-Bopp in 1997. At it's peak it was so bright you could easily see it from inside a brightly lit restaurant, looking out a window 20 feet away.

ethbr17• 2 years ago

Little known fact: Hale-Bopp is also the only comet to have a #1 song dedicated to it.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NHozn0YXAeE (Released 14 days after perihelion in 1997)

Brajeshwar• 2 years ago

Wow! I believe this was around the beginning of the end of MTV being MTV. These were one of the many songs my friends and I grew up on. ;-)

SketchySeaBeast• 2 years ago

I knew what it was and I still clicked.

zeckalpha• 2 years ago

Ooh, maybe we'll get this at the same time as the nova https://www.space.com/new-star-night-sky-nova-explosion-rare

belter2• 2 years ago

C/2023 A3 (Tsuchinshan–ATLAS): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C/2023_A3_(Tsuchinshan%E2%80%9...

BurningFrog• 2 years ago

If you read it all you get to the bad news:

Most — though admittedly not all — comets originating from the Oort cloud usually end up being duds. Typically, as these comets cross the orbit of Mars, their steady brightening trend starts to falter, similar to a marathon runner at the 20-mile mark; "hitting the wall" so to speak. In the case of a comet having emerged from the Oort cloud, a sudden decline in brightening may be signaling that it ultimately will end up underperforming.

hawk_• 2 years ago

Isn't that good news though? Careful what you wish for :-)

adrianN• 2 years ago

I don’t think comet brightness is an indicator for dangerousness.

TechPlasma• 2 years ago

Wake me when it's brighter than the sun.

CoastalCoder3• 2 years ago

Wake me when it's brighter than the sun.

I doubt we'll need to.

rickydroll• 2 years ago

appearing as nothing more than faint, fuzzy blobs of light.

In my experience, this is all comets

sys_64738• 2 years ago

Don't look at bright objects in the sky.

A comet approaching Earth could become brighter than the stars this fall

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