Well, ladies and gentlemen, 2025 is already off to a really weird start as chaos literally rains down from the heavens. On New Year’s Eve, four of the most iconic buildings in the United States were struck by lightning. The odds of that happening are astronomical. The following day, there was a terrorist attack in New Orleans and in Las Vegas. Not long after that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau resigns from his post, and now we’re seeing one of the worst wildfire disasters in our history ravaging Los Angeles.
And if that wasn’t a enough, a “once-in-a-lifetime” comet, which only comes around every 160,000 years is about to be visible from our planet.
If you’re a fan of skygazing, make sure you have your eyes to the skies this evening. A once-in-a-lifetime comet is set to become visible for the first time in 160,000 years – and you don’t want to miss it. The comet, called C/2024 G3 (ATLAS), was discovered by the ATLAS survey sytem, and has been slowly approaching the inner solar system.
You, like most people, have probably not heard of this comet. This means a lot of folks are going to end up missing it when it comes around, missing the only chance they will ever get to see it with their own eyes.
According to the BBC:
A bright comet could be visible in skies across the globe over the coming days for the first time in 160,000 years. Nasa said the future brightness of a comet is “notoriously hard” to predict, but that Comet C/2024 G3 (Atlas) could remain bright enough to be seen by the naked eye. On Monday, the comet was at perihelion, the point at which it is closest to the Sun, which influences how bright it appears. Experts say it could be visible from Monday night.
Folks who dwell in the southern hemisphere will have the best opportunity for seeing the comet with their own eyes without needing any sort of special equipment.
On the bright side, quite literally I might add, there will be billions of comets in the Kuiper Belt.
NASA estimates there are billions of comets orbiting the Sun in the Kuiper Belt – a region of the solar system home to Pluto – and the more distant Oort Cloud.
Continuing on our current topic of things falling out of the sky, in Kenya earlier this month, it’s being reported that a large “glowing ring of metal” landed in the country.
It has been more than a week since reports first emerged about a “glowing ring of metal” that fell from the sky and crashed near a remote village in Kenya.
According to the Kenya Space Agency, the object weighed 1,100 pounds (500 kg) and had a diameter of more than 8 feet (2.4 meters) when measured after it landed on December 30. A couple of days later, the space agency confidently reported that the object was a piece of space debris, saying it was a ring that separated from a rocket. “Such objects are usually designed to burn up as they re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere or to fall over unoccupied areas, such as the oceans,” the space agency told The New York Times.
The official story is that it was a piece of space junk, however, it doesn’t seem anyone can tell us where it actually came from. A bit strange, right? You shouldn’t have a hard time identifying a hunk of circular metal that’s over 8 feet wide and is over 1,000 pounds.
So far though, no further details are available.
Since those initial reports were published in Western media, a small band of dedicated space trackers have been using open source data to try to identify precisely which space object fell into Kenya. So far, they have not been able to identify the rocket launch to which the large ring can be attributed.
Weirder still is the sudden change in the behavior of our Sun. Tons of people have taken to social media to discuss the gigantic coronal hole that spans “1/4 of the circumference of the Sun.”
A huge coronal hole spanning 1/4 of the circumference of the Sun is opening, allowing unusually fast solar winds to head towards Earth, #NASA announces.
Not a lot of coverage being given to this story by news outlets except for this one.
NASA reported that a massive coronal hole recently opened across the Sun’s circumference, further letting out an alarmingly fast stream of solar wind reaching speeds up to 800 km/s, towards the Earth causing concern and panic across social media. The matter in question also sparked debate among scientists about its possible effect on Earth, since it can lead to geomagnetic storms causing disturbance for satellite operations and electrical systems. Moreover, these geometrical disturbances can also result in lower magnetic latitudes.
Anyone else afraid to find out what the rest of the year has in store?
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