New found comet will make an appearance in 2013

June 29, 2011 – HAWAII – There’s a new found comet closing in on the Sun, and when it gets here in 2013, you may be able to see it with your naked eye. Astronomers stumbled upon the icy interloper on June 5 while searching for potentially hazardous asteroids. Equipped with the world’s largest digital camera—1,400 megapixels—the University of Hawaii’s Pan-STARRS team snagged a faint image of the odd object while it was more than 700 million miles (1.1 billion kilometers) away, between the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn. “Almost everything we find is an asteroid, but this object was suspicious,” said Richard Wainscoat, co-discoverer of the comet and an astronomer at the University of Hawaii. “Unlike asteroids, which appear point-like in images, the telltale sign that gave it away was its fuzzy appearance.” By March 2013 the comet, named C/2011 L4 (PANSTARRS), is expected to come within 30 million miles (48 million kilometers) of the Sun—closer even than the innermost planet, Mercury. When the comet makes its closest approach to the Sun, more of its ices will vaporize, adding to its hazy envelope of gas and dust and producing the familiar tail. This denser envelope, or coma, should boost the comet to peak brightness, making it potentially visible to the naked eye low in the western horizon just after sunset. While there is no danger of collision with Earth, preliminary calculations of the comet’s orbit show that this may be its first and final trip through the solar system. “It may be coming around the Sun for the first and only time, only to be ejected from the solar system, never to return,” Wainscoat said. “Since we don’t have a lot of data on it, we really don’t know the orbit well enough right now, and it will take up to two months of observations to find out.” –National Geographic

We are entering a denser region of space with more debris. Comet and asteroid dangers, as can be seen from the increasing number of comets grazing the Sun, will precipitously rise.