What is Green Comet?

Tonight at 11:00 PM you will be able to see a green comet in the sky in Pakistan if the sky is clear and you are in a place where there are no city lights. You can see this comet passing close to the Pole Star. The last time this comet was seen from Earth was 50,000 years ago when humans were living in the Stone Age. To track it you can download various apps from Google Play Store like SkyMap, SkyView, SkySafari etc.

The name of this comet is Comet 2023 E3 (ZTF). And it will pass by about four and a half million kilometers from the Earth between February 11 and February 12 tonight. Comets are not actually stars, but rather tiny asteroids in the solar system made of gas, ice, rocks, or dust that orbit the sun in a long, elliptical orbit. They glow because sunlight hits them. When they come between the sun and the earth in their orbit, the light from the sun heats them up and the gases trapped in them come out, which take the form of tails. These gases reflect the light of the sun and thus the tails of these bodies are visible just as the smoke of an airplane flying in the air is visible in the light of the sun.

The orbit of these comets around the sun is several hundreds of years.

That is why most comets are visible after many centuries or decades. The number of comets found so far in our solar system is above 3500. But their total number can be more than that.

The green comet visible from Earth today will have a green head. This is because the carbon atoms in it are joined in the form of a molecule of two atoms that is in the form of a gas, called diatomic carbon, and when it is exposed to ultraviolet rays from the sun, it breaks down. separate and emit green light.