NASA scientists discover ‘largest comet ever seen’

A comet with a nucleus 50 times larger than usual is moving close to Earth at 35,000 kilometers per hour.

NASA’s Hubble Telescope has determined that Comet icy core Its mass is about 500 billion tons, and its width is 137 km, which is larger than the US state of Rhode Island.

But do not worry. Closest is 1.6 billion km from the sun, and it won’t be until 2031.

It was first seen in 2010, but Only so far has Hubble been able to confirm its existence.

s It’s bigger than any comet astronomers have seen before.

“We’ve always suspected that this comet should be so big because it’s so bright at such a great distance,” said David Jewett, professor of planetary sciences and astronomy at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). “Now we confirm it.”

NASA, which describes the ice sphere as a “giant ball hurtling in that direction,” named it Bernardinelli-Bernstein after its discovery by astronomers Pedro Bernardinelli and Gary Bernstein.

They first saw it while working at the Cerro Tololo Pan-American Observatory in Chile more than a decade ago when it was more than 3.0 billion miles from the sun.

NASA scientists have discovered the “largest comet ever seen”.Container

NASA describes comets as icy “LEGO blocks,” leftovers from the early days of planet-building. “They were unceremoniously expelled from the Solar System in a gravitational pinball game between massive exoplanets,” it said in a statement.

“The ejected comets settled in the Oort Cloud, a huge reservoir of distant comets that surround the solar system,” he added.

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Man Tu Hui, of the Macau University of Science and Technology, described the comet as an “amazing object,” adding: “We assumed that a comet could be very large, but we needed the best data to confirm that.”

Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein has been following an elliptical orbit for 3 billion years, putting it away from the Sun by about half a light-year. culprit now Less than 3.2 billion kilometers from the sun, it falls almost perpendicular to the plane of our solar system.

Lovell Loxley

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