Natural phenomena that might occur this year include the chance to watch two comets that the comet Pan-STARRS will be across the Earth in about March 2013 and the comet ISON eight months later.
The newly discovered comet ISON will fly 1.9 million miles from the center of the Sun on 28 November 2013, says astronomer Donald Yeomans, head of NASA's Near Earth Object Program at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
When a comet approaches, the Sun's heat will evaporate the ice on the body of the comet, creating what is called a tail seeing spectacular night sky visible from Earth without using a telescope on Oktobet 2013 through January 2014 if the comet survives through the Sun.
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| Image of comet Pan-STARRS. (Picture from: http://cometography.com/) |
"ISON comet could be the brightest comet seen in several generations even brighter than the full moon," said the British astronomer David Whitehouse, told The Independent. ISON Comets can shattered while close to the sun and can fail to form particles of the tail that could be seen from the Earth.
Astronomical objects such as ISON comet come from the Oort Cloud, a group of igneous rock and ice around the sun at a distance of 50,000 times farther from Earth's orbit.
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| Image of comet ISON. (Picture from: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/) |
On September 21, 2012, two amateur astronomers from Russia captures the image of a comet with a 16-inch telescope that is part of the International Scientific Optical Network (ISON), which is then used as the name of the comet.
"These objects are slow and have a unique movement. But initially we were not sure this is a comet because of the scale of the drawing is quite small," said astronomer Artyom Novichonok, one of the comet discoverers.
Then Artyom Novichonok and his discoverer colleagues, Vitali Nevski, monitored again using the bigger telescopes in Maidanak Observatory in Uzbekistan.
Another astronomers do the same and confirmed that objects beyond the orbit of Jupiter in the Cancer constellation was indeed a comet.
Comet ISON's path is very similar to a comet that passed by Earth in 1680, one which was so bright its tail reportedly could be seen in daylight.
The projected orbit of comet ISON is so similar to the 1680 comet that some scientists are wondering if they are fragments from a common parent body. *** [REUTERS | SRI | PIKIRAN RAKYAT 03012013]
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