RIP Comet Leonard, a Bright Visitor in a Dark Time

Leonard won’t be making its subsequent 80,000-year-long journey across the Sun, because the mile-wide comet seems to have disintegrated in late February.

Astronomer Gregory Leonard from the Catalina Sky Survey was the primary human to identify the comet, which he did on January 3, 2021, a yr earlier than its perihelion on January 2, 2022. This closest strategy to the Sun proved to be Leonard’s undoing, as all indicators level to the demise of this soiled snowball—the brightest of the earlier yr.

“It is now moving away from the Sun and has not only faded but is now missing its two most important parts: its nucleus (core) and its coma (the nebulous envelope surrounding the nucleus, which appears when a comet passes near the sun),” EarthSky reports.

At perihelion, Leonard, often known as Comet C/2021 A1, got here to inside 56 million miles (90 million kilometers) of the Sun. By comparability, Earth throughout perihelion involves inside 91 million miles (147 million km) of the star. The Sun’s heat introduced Leonard to life, inflicting it to launch fuel and mud, however the comet’s sojourn by means of the internal photo voltaic system turned out to be its undoing.

Scientists have been ready to research Leonard utilizing the Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory-A (STEREO-A), operated by NASA, and Solar Orbiter, a joint undertaking of NASA and ESA. Comets are typically like snowflakes, as no two are alike when it comes to their habits, and so they’re nearly not possible to foretell.

When Gregory Leonard first noticed the comet, it was nonetheless method out close to the orbit of Jupiter. Speculation emerged that it would turn out to be seen to the unaided eye because it obtained nearer, however this turned out to not be the case, because the comet might solely be seen with telescopes and binoculars. And like all comet cruising for a photo voltaic flyby, Leonard was susceptible to disintegrating, a chance that seems to have transpired. The 1-mile-wide (1.6-km) comet, which had simply barely began its 40,0000-yr return journey to the outer photo voltaic system, appears to have fizzled out.

Astronomers started to note the indicators of the comet’s doom across the time of its perihelion. These included fluctuations in its brightness each three to 5 days and wonky structural adjustments in its tail—a possible sign that chunks have been falling off the nucleus, based on EarthSky. On February 23, 2022, astronomer Martin Mašek from the Institute of Physics on the Czech Academy of Sciences found that Leonard, which might solely be seen within the southern hemisphere, had turn out to be a fading streak in area, with no glowing head. Mašek carried out distant observations from an observatory in Chile.

The most probably state of affairs is that the nucleus disintegrated or evaporated, or a mixture of the 2. Regardless, Leonard will go down in historical past because the brightest comet of 2021. It’s unhappy to lose a fellow traveler, however comets do seem within the sky with respectable regularity. There’s certain to be one other one quickly, and the subsequent one might even be seen to the bare eye.

More: Mega comet arriving from the Oort cloud is 85 miles extensive.