A Hungarian astronomer has discovered the solar system’s first comet of 2022, and the achievement is attributed to Kristian Sarniczky, an astronomer at the Miklos Konkoli-Thegg Institute for Astronomy of the Center for Research on Astronomy and Earth Sciences. RTL.hu.
The last time a comet was discovered in Hungary was in 1986, and Sarniczky was the third Hungarian astronomer to be named after a comet. On the night of January 1-2, the Piszkéstető Observatory spotted comet C/2022 A1 in the Lynx constellation as a previously invisible nebula in the Schmidt telescope. Take three photos of the area with an exposure time of 104 seconds.
The path of the comet, which is invisible to the naked eye and can only be observed with astronomical telescopes, has only been known for a few days, but it is already known that it was closest to Earth on January 8 at 21:20, 47.6 million km, it will be closer to the Sun on 31 January, 180 million km.
As Sarnetsky told the portal, it’s a very fast-moving comet that orbits the sun in the opposite direction to the Earth, so it has visited here with lightning and has only been back for a very long time.
“It is a very small comet, one of the faintest of all. It is about 50,000 times fainter than comets visible with the naked eye or hand-held telescopes. Its nuclei can be many times ten meters in diameter, its diameter can be up to a hundred meters, and its nebulae range from 6 to 8000 km, which is roughly the size of the planet Mars,” the astronomer explained.
