MUMBAI: Amateur and professional astronomers around the world, who are tracking the rare and spectacular disintegration of Comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3, can observe the dying comet on May 12 when it passes Earth.
The comet will be visible to sky observers at a distance of 11.7 million kilometers only through a powerful telescope, senior astronomer Mayank Vahia of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research said on Thursday.
"The comet shower can be seen near constellation Cancer, which is close to the moon and the planet Saturn," Vahia said.
It is a rare event that a comet is being torn apart due to gravitation pull of solar system objects, he said.
Recently, NASA has communicated the prediction of former Director of US-based Exopolitics Institute, Eric Julian, of a "mega" tsunami created by a possible impact of the falling of a fragment of the comet on May 25 in the Atlantic Ocean.
NASA spoke directly to Julian to spread the vital warning, following which he had set up a web site for the purpose.
"While this comet has been seen by astronomers since 1930, it seems to have started disintegrating since 1995," Vahia said.
"It is very rare to see comets break up like this," the senior astronomer said. In fact, it is of great excitement to those who study the solar system and help realise that the solar system is not an uneventful place," Vahia said.
"As the comet plummets towards a close encounter with the sun, swinging round the Sun on June 7 and heading away to begin another loop round the solar system, the comet will pass the Earth on May 12," the spokesperson of Akash Ganga Centre for Astronomy in Badlapur in the nearby Thane district, Bharat Adur said.
"The NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope is providing astronomers with extraordinary views of comet 73P/Schwassmann-Wachmann 3 as it disintegrates before our eyes", Adur said, adding recent Hubble images have uncovered many more fragments than have been reported by ground-based observers.
"The observations provide an unprecedented opportunity to study the demise of a comet nucleus," the city's amateur astronomers, who are preparing to catch a glimpse of the comet shower, said.
Ground-based observers have noted dramatic brightening of events associated with some of the fragments indicating that they are continuing to break up and that some may disappear altogether, they added.
Astronomers said cometary nuclei are deep-frozen relics of the early solar system, consisting of porous and fragile mixes of dust and ices.
They can be broken up by many different mechanisms: be ripped apart by gravitational tidal forces when they pass near large bodies (for example, Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 was torn to pieces when it skirted near Jupiter in 1992, before plunging into Jupiter's atmosphere two years later), fly apart as the nucleus rotates rapidly, crumble under thermal stresses as they pass near the sun, or pop apart explosively like corks from champagne bottles, they explained.
