Muy Interesante<\/a><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"http:\/\/feeling.com.mx\/img\/2013\/01\/ison-300x300.jpg\" "\\"ison\\"")
Within days after a new comet is first discovered, astronomers can tell you exactly what its path through the solar system will look like. They can calculate when it will make its closest approach to the Sun, how near it will be to Earth at any given moment and even when \u2014 or whether \u2014 it\u2019s likely to make a return visit.<\/p>\n
What they can\u2019t say for sure is how brilliant a show it will put on for us. Back in the 1970\u2019s, Comet Kohoutek was billed as the \u201cComet of the Century,\u201d but it turned out to be so disappointing that it ended up as a laugh line for Johnny Carson on the Tonight Show. Even a well-known comet like Halley\u2019s, whose 1986 appearance was ballyhooed years in advance, can turn out to be a dud.<\/p>\n
With that caveat noted, however, there\u2019s a reasonable chance that Earth is in for a celestial display just about a year from now. Comet ISON, discovered by two amateurs \u2014 one from Belarus, one from Russia \u2014 in September, shows early signs of being truly spectacular. At its brightest, in fact, ISON could put out as much light as the full Moon but concentrated into a smaller area \u2014 and if that turns out to be true, the term \u201cdream comet,\u201d now floating around the internet, would be an understatement.<\/p>\n
There\u2019s a legitimate possibility this might indeed be the real deal: for one thing, ISON (named for the International Scientific Optical Network, of which discoverers Artyom Novichonok and Vitali Nevski members) was first seen when it was nearly 600 million miles (965 million km) from the Sun, well beyond the orbit of Jupiter. That\u2019s unusually distant for a comet to be spotted: these interplanetary chunks of debris usually live in the frigid realms out beyond Neptune and are more or less invisible until solar heat begins boiling ice and dust from their surfaces, forming a light-reflecting halo (known technically as its coma), that makes them seem bigger than they really are.<\/p>\n
The fact that ISON can already be seen means it may be reasonably large \u2014 perhaps a couple of miles across \u2014 which suggests that when it dips to less than a million miles (1.6 million km) above the Sun\u2019s fires next November 28, it may be robust enough to avoid the breakup that often happens to smaller comets. And if it does survive, ISON could go on to light up the night sky in the Northern Hemisphere for much of December, 2013 and on into January.<\/p>\n
Comet experts are also making much of the fact that ISON\u2019s path is very similar to that of Kirch\u2019s Comet, a.k.a. Newton\u2019s Comet, a.k.a. the Great Comet of 1680, which was bright enough to be seen in daylight and had a magnificently long tail (it was also the first comet ever discovered with a telescope). It\u2019s not the same object, but it\u2019s quite possible that both are chunks of a much larger body that broke apart long ago, maybe during its own passage through the inner solar system. The fact that such larger bodies exist isn\u2019t in doubt: Pluto, for example, is essentially a gigantic chunk of dirty ice.<\/p>\n
TIME<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"En 2012, el bielorruso Vitali Nevski y el ruso Artyom Novichonok descubrieron un cometa llamado C\/2012 S1, que se dirige hacia el Sol procedente de alg\u00fan lugar entre las \u00f3rbitas de J\u00fapiter y de Saturno. Seg\u00fan las previsiones de los astr\u00f3nomos, a finales de noviembre de 2013 pasar\u00e1 muy cerca de nuestra estrella y alcanzar\u00e1 un brillo de magnitud 11,6, equivalente al de la Luna llena, lo que podr\u00eda hacerlo…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":21099,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[29,24],"tags":[7215,7214,7216],"views":525,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.feeling.com.mx\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21096"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.feeling.com.mx\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.feeling.com.mx\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.feeling.com.mx\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.feeling.com.mx\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21096"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.feeling.com.mx\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21096\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.feeling.com.mx\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21099"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.feeling.com.mx\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21096"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.feeling.com.mx\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21096"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.feeling.com.mx\/site\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21096"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"\"](\"http:\/\/feeling.com.mx\/img\/2013\/01\/ison-2013.jpg\" "\\"ison-2013\\"")
En 2012, el bielorruso Vitali Nevski y el ruso Artyom Novichonok descubrieron un cometa llamado C\/2012 S1, que se dirige hacia el Sol procedente de alg\u00fan lugar entre las \u00f3rbitas de J\u00fapiter y de Saturno. Seg\u00fan las previsiones de los astr\u00f3nomos, a finales de noviembre de 2013 pasar\u00e1 muy cerca de nuestra estrella y alcanzar\u00e1 un brillo de magnitud 11,6, equivalente al de la Luna llena, lo que podr\u00eda hacerlo visible durante el d\u00eda a simple vista. Que un cometa sea visible en estas condiciones es poco habitual: en los \u00faltimos 332 a\u00f1os ha sucedido \u00fanicamente 9 veces.<\/p>\n