Baku, April 18, AZERTAC
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope has determined the size of the giant comet C/2014 UN271 aka Bernardinelli-Bernstein, which was spotted earlier this summer. The estimated diameter of its core is about 137 kilometers. It is about 50 times larger than comets discovered so far – and thus the largest that astronomers have ever seen, as announced by Nasa.
Its mass is estimated at a staggering 500 trillion tons—100,000 times that of a typical comet. The mega-comet is currently several billion kilometers from Earth and is moving through the solar system at a speed of about 35,000 kilometers per hour.
“We’ve always suspected that this comet must be big because it’s so bright at such a great distance. Now we’ve been able to confirm that,” explains David Jewitt, Professor of Astronomy at the University of California. He is also co-author of the new study on the comet, published this week in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The researchers used the Hubble Space Telescope for this and took five pictures of the comet on January 8, 2022.
The challenge in surveying the comet was to distinguish the solid core from the huge dusty aura that envelops it. The comet is currently too far away. This is why the telescope cannot resolve its core visually either. Instead, the Hubble data shows a bright spike of light at the core’s location.
Don’t panic, just fascination – Even if the new findings sound threatening, Bernardinelli-Bernstein will probably never get closer than 1.6 billion kilometers to the sun. The comet was spotted by astronomers Pedro Bernardinelli and Gary Bernstein in archival images from an observatory in Chile. It was first observed incidentally in November 2010 when it was about five billion kilometers from the Sun.
The comet comes from a region at the edge of the solar system, the Oort cloud. It is a huge collection of comets and surrounds the solar system like a spherical shell with an extent of about one and a half light years. Well-known cosmic objects like comet Halley or Hale-Bopp come from there.
According to the researchers, the previous record holder among comets is comet C/2002 VQ94, whose core is estimated to be around one hundred kilometers in diameter. He was discovered in 2002.
© Any use of materials must be identified by the hyperlink
If you find an error in the text, mark it by pressing ctrl+enter and send it to us