NASA has found that the Bernardinelli-Bernstein Comet, discovered in 2010, is 500 trillion tons in size, more than 80 miles wide, and has a nucleus about 50 times larger than most known comets.
The agency’s Hubble Space Telescope first detected the massive comet C/2014 UN271 (Bernardinelli-Bernstein) in 2010, but scientists confirmed its size this week.
And while the comet is currently less than two billion miles from the sun and is heading toward Earth, NASA rest assured that it does not pose any threat to us.
Scientists have confirmed that it will not approach the sun by more than a billion miles, which is a distance slightly farther than the distance of the planet Saturn. And NASA said that won’t last until 2031.
The radius of the comet’s nucleus is 80 miles, and it travels at a speed of up to 22,000 miles per hour, and its temperature is (-193 degrees Celsius).
Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein has an estimated mass of 500 trillion tons, which is about 100,000 times greater than the mass of typical comets found near the Sun.
Professor David Jewett revealed that this comet is literally the tip of the iceberg of several thousand comets too faint to be seen in the farthest parts of the solar system.
To check its size, the team used NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to take 5 pictures of the comet on January 8, 2022.
Using a computer model, the researchers were able to accurately estimate its mass, as they believe it originated in the Oort Cloud – the most remote region in our solar system that harbors trillions of comets.