For sky observers, the upcoming month of April may be the busiest month of the year, due to various astronomical phenomena, on April 29, an asteroid with a diameter of 4 kilometers visited low Earth orbit, on April 22, a yellow light suddenly appeared over the Arctic Circle, on April 7, the first pink moon of 2020 appeared on the dome, on April 4, the second interstellar visitor 2I/Borisov began to disintegrate, and on April 1, multiple planets gathered together in the night sky.
And now there is another green planet is rapidly lighting up above the night sky, if you have a pair of eyes with super good vision, you will find that it appears in our field of vision, showing dim "fluff" on the night sky, if you can have a small astronomical telescope it is better, see more clearly, because its brightness has recently been greatly improved, the brightness value has reached +5.5, into the naked eye vision visible range, this green planet is the new comet named C/2020F8 (SWAN).
On April 29, After 40 minutes of tracking time, Gerald Rhemann, a sky watcher at Tivoli Farm in Namibia, Africa, took a 12-inch image of a 12-inch celestial body with a 30-minute exposure, and Comet C/2020 F8 (SWAN) looked gorgeous, emitting a foggy green light, and a blue wavy line appeared behind it, swaying from its tail. Because the comet's tail is so long, it extends about 8 degrees in the sky and is millions of kilometers long, so the photo can't show it all, only 1.2 degrees.
C/2020F8 (SWAN) is a newly discovered comet discovered on March 25 this year by the SWAN camera of the Heliosphere Observer (SOHO) in low Earth orbit. Now, C/2020F8 (SWAN), located in the direction of the constellation Aquarius, about 0.8 AU from Earth, is now approaching the Sun, and the brightness may rise to level four in the early hours of next month. It is rich in hydrogen and is now well suited for observation from the southern hemisphere, such as Australia, New Zealand and South America. But by the end of May, it was suitable for viewing in the northern hemisphere.
NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, JPL, made three days of observations of C/2020F8 (SWAN) and found that the comet orbit is hyperbolic and has an eccentricity of 1.1±0.2, so there is great uncertainty in the next few thousand or millions of years. JPL expects that on May 12, 2020, the comet will pass near Earth, about 84 million kilometers from Earth. By May 27, 2020, the comet will fly by the Sun, with a closest distance of only 64 million kilometers.
Of course, much of what comes to comet SWAN is still unknown, where it originally came from, what kind of material it was made of, whether it would contain a lot of rare material, how long it would last, and how long it would eventually disintegrate into pieces over time. In the future, will it have the possibility of colliding with The Earth? So astronomers are seizing the opportunity to make further observations of C/2020F8. So please set your phone alarm clock, the time is around May 12, visible to the naked eye. Interesting scientific exploration content, please pay attention to the only WeChat public account: Interesting Exploration