Don’t Miss Out on This Rare Sight! A ‘Potentially Interstellar’ Comet Will Grace the Skies Next Month – Here’s How to Catch a Glimpse Before It Departs Our Solar System Eternally

A “potentially interstellar” comet hurtling through space at 240,000 miles per hour will be visible in September before it leaves our solar system.

Comet Nishimura, which was discovered earlier this month, will make its closest approach to Earth around 10am BST on Tuesday, September 12.

It will come within 125 million kilometers of our planet and should be visible to the naked eye as a star-like mass with a “tail”, like a “dirty snowball”.

Five days later, on September 17, Comet Nishimura will reach “perihelion”, defined as the closest approach to the Sun, at about 32 million kilometers.

It will “slingshot” around our star before heading back in the direction it came from, never to be seen by us earthlings again.

Comets are made of ice, dust, and rocky material, and are different from asteroids, which are made of metals and rocky material.

As a comet approaches the Sun, its ice and dust contents begin to vaporize (known as sublimation), giving it a distinctive tail and a hazy or cloudy halo, known as a coma.

Comet Nishimura has been described as “potentially interstellar,” meaning it may come from another solar system.

It was discovered by Hideo Nishimura of Japan on August 12 using a telephoto lens mounted on a Canon camera while it was about 150 million kilometers from the sun.

It has since been snapped in a picture by another photographer in June Lake, California in recent days, appearing as a green blob with its slender tail.

NASA said in a blog post that the new comet (officially named C/2023 P1 Nishimura) should be visible to the naked eye within a few days on either side of its close approach.

‘Will Comet Nishimura be visible to the naked eye? Given the unpredictability of comets, no one can say for sure, but currently it seems like a good bet,” he said.

“As the comet dips toward the Sun, it will likely continue to intensify and possibly become a naked-eye object in early September.”

Comet Nishimura will slingshot the sun, where its trajectory will be altered by the great gravitational power of our star before returning to deep space.

Nishimura will get so close to the Sun (within the orbit of the planet Mercury) that its core could break apart.

The nucleus is the solid central part of the comet, made up of rock, dust, and frozen gases such as carbon dioxide and methane.

According Earth Heaventhe public should try to observe the comet with a small telescope during the remaining days of August because it may not survive its pass near the sun.

Another potential problem is that the comet will also be angularly close to the Sun, so it will only be possible to see it near sunset or sunrise, when it reflects just the right amount of sunlight.

According to NASA, a comet does not emit light of its own and what appears to be comet light is actually a reflection of sunlight.

“Sunlight bounces off the comet’s ice particles in the same way that light bounces off a mirror,” he says.

Further orbital calculations could determine whether Nishimura’s comet is truly interstellar; MailOnline has contacted NASA for more information.

Interstellar objects are interesting to astronomers because they can provide information about other solar systems that we cannot reach.

Only three such objects have been observed, including the first, a meteor, which struck Earth in 2014 and was only confirmed by US Space Command as the first interstellar object eight years later.

The second, ‘Oumuamua, was discovered in October 2017, and the third, Comet Borisov, was discovered in August 2019.

Originally classified as a comet, ‘Oumuamua was later reclassified as an asteroid because it lacked a coma (the cloud of gases that surrounds a comet’s nucleus).

Meanwhile, 2I/Borisov is one of the most “pristine” comets ever observed, scientists announced in 2021, meaning it hasn’t been altered or degraded by heat and radiation from stars like our sun.