2022: Blue comet K2 heading for Earth

[Onetrickponystar]

Could this be the major cosmic event c.q. The Wave, the C's are mentioning?

Check story here..

The comet is supposed to have a diameter of about 110.000 km, and is estimated to pass Earth at about 2 AU in July 2022.

Any thoughts?

 

[Cosmos]

Possible but pretty unlikely. 1 AU is defined as the distance between the sun and earth (about 15 Million Kilometers). The closest approach of Comet C/2017 K2 to earth is estimated to be around 1.8 AU, which means that the Comet will be about 27 Million Kilometers away from earth at that point in time.

For comparison, the moon is about 384.000 Kilometers away from earth. While the coma of the Comet is estimated to be between 130,000 and 200,000 Kilometers (pretty normal for a comet) the actual size of the comet (nucleus) is estimated to be less than 18 Kilometers. The max brightness of the comet is estimated to be around + 6.0, which is defined as the "typical limit of naked eye" which means that according to the estimates the comet could be visible with the naked eye at night but it will be as bright as the faintest stars you can see at night when you look up and look for the faintest ones.

For comparison: If the comet would be 1.8 LD (Lunar Distances) away from earth at his closets approach (which it isn't!), things might be different, but even then, the comet size and characteristics wouldn't be out of the ordinary and the distance to earth still quite significant. We have seen many objects with similar size and much bigger in the last years, flying by earth much closer than even this hypothetical 1.8 LD distance for comparison.

C/2017 K2 (PanSTARRS) - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

Magnitude (astronomy) - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

 

[Vulcan59]

Possible but pretty unlikely. 1 AU is defined as the distance between the sun and earth (about 15 Million Kilometers). The closest approach of Comet C/2017 K2 to earth is estimated to be around 1.8 AU, which means that the Comet will be about 27 Million Kilometers away from earth at that point in time.

Definition of astronomical unit. For general reference, we can say that one astronomical unit (AU) represents the mean distance between the Earth and our sun. An AU is approximately 93 million miles (150 million km). It’s approximately 8 light-minutes.

More exactly, one astronomical unit (AU) = 92,955,807 miles (149,597,871 km).

- Source