Discovered in January 2023 by telescopes at the Tsuchinshan Observatory in China and confirmed by the ATLAS project in South Africa, this comet was so nicknamed because of its exceptional brightness and the rarity of its trajectory.

According to astronomers, it will be seen throughout the northern hemisphere as a bright fireball in the dark sky, with a long, extended tail equal to the diameter of 42 moons.

In late September the star passed close to the sun without disintegrating, a phenomenon known as perihelion.

It is estimated that it may have last passed around the sun 80,000 years ago, when Neanderthals were able to observe it.

It bears the letter C in its name because it is a non-periodic comet, i.e., with an open trajectory estimated in thousands of years.

Tsuchinshan-ATLAS comes from the Oort cloud, at the limits of the gravitational field of the solar system and its place of origin, a huge storehouse of stellar objects from which Halley´s comet arose.

This event also evokes the impressive Hale-Bopp and Hyakutake comets that almost three decades ago left an indelible mark on the memory of scientists and astronomy lovers.

jrr/jav/rgh/lpn