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A comet approaching Earth could become brighter than the stars this fall
Tsuchinshan–ATLAS might become as brilliant as Venus.
Originally thought to be an asteroid, it was later determined that this same object was photographed six weeks earlier by the Purple Mountain Observatory (Tsuchinshan) in the east of Nanjing, China. (Image credit: Wikimedia Commons/C messier/CC BY 4.0) Unfortunately, there is a caveat: calculations show that Tsuchinshan–ATLAS has an orbital eccentricity of 1.0001081, meaning that it is a "first-timer," coming directly from the Oort cloud, a spherical shell of icy space debris scientists theorize to be situated far beyond the outer limits of the solar system and thought to contain billions or even trillions of comets. Typically, as these comets cross the orbit of Mars, their steady brightening trend starts to falter, similar to a marathon runner at the 20-mile mark; "hitting the wall" so to speak.
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