NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has analyzed the size of the largest icy comet nucleus ever observed by astronomers. It has an estimated diameter of 80 miles, making it larger than the state of Rhode Island. The nucleus is about 50 times larger than the nucleus of most known comets.
The colossal comet C/2014 UN271 (Bernardinelli-Bernstein) is traveling across the solar system at 22,000 miles per hour. It will never get closer to the sun than 1 billion miles, which is slightly farther than Saturn’s distance and will never happen until 2031
“This is an amazing object, considering how active it is despite being so far from the sun,” said Man-To House of Macau University of Science and Technology in Taipa, Macau.
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Comet C/2002 VQ94 managed to hold the previous record, with a core estimated to be 60 miles in diameter. The Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) project discovered it in 2002.
Comet C/2014 UN271 was discovered in archival footage from the Dark Energy Survey from the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile by astronomers Pedro Bernardinelli and Gary Bernstein.
Hubble can’t see the comet’s nucleus right now because it’s too far away. Instead, Hubble data shows a vivid peak of light near the core. Hui and his colleagues then installed a new computer model of the surrounding coma, which they adapted from the Hubble images. The glow from the coma was then subtracted to reveal the star-like core.
Hui and his collaborators reported the brightness of the core from previous radio observations from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) in Chile.
Hubble determined the size of the largest icy comet nucleus ever seen!
It’s bigger than Rhode Island and going this way at 22,000 miles per hour, but don’t worry — it won’t get closer than a billion miles from the sun, a little further away than Saturn: pic.twitter.com/1K6sqAJsU8
— Hubble (@NASAHubble) Apr 12, 2022
The comet has been heading toward the sun for over a million years. It comes from the Oort Cloud, which is thought to be a breeding ground for trillions of comets. The inner edge of the diffuse cloud is thought to be 2,000 to 5,000 times the distance between the sun and Earth. Its outer edge could be more than a quarter of the way to the range between our sun and the nearest stars.
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According to NASA, its mass is estimated at 500 trillion tons, which is a hundred thousand times greater than the mass of a typical comet found much closer to the Sun.