Using the Hubble space telescope, NASA has spotted the largest “megacomet,” 50 times larger than ever seen, an 85-mile wide, 5 trillion ton space rock, hurtling toward Earth at 22,000 miles per hour.
Record-breaking ‘megacomet’ 85-miles wide hurtling toward Earth
Using the Hubble space telescope, NASA says it has spotted what it calls a “megacomet,” a massive rock, dust, and ice that is the largest the space agency has ever seen, spanning 85-miles across. It’s moving toward Earth, the BBC reported.
“The behemoth comet is barreling this way at 22,000 miles per hour from the edge of the solar system,” NASA wrote in a post on its website.
The comet’s size makes it larger than the state of Rhode Island. It was first discovered in 2010, but NASA has only now estimated and confirmed its nucleus size, which represents its core, at 85-miles across.
Technically the comet is known as C/2014 UN271. It is now surpassed the previously largest known comet known as C/2002 VQ94, which becomes the second-largest at 60 miles across.
Estimates of the comet’s mass put its weight at 5 trillion tons, about 100,000 times greater than the mass of a typical comet that is found closer to the Sun.
About the comet’s discovery
Comet C/2014 UN271 (a.k.a. Bernardinelli-Bernstein) was accidentally discovered when two astronomers, Pedro Bernardinelli and Gary Bernstein, were looking through archival images from the Dark Energy Survey at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. The image captured the comet when it was 3 billion miles from the Sun, almost the average distance to Neptune. After the comet’s discovery, astronomers have intensely studied it with ground and space-based telescopes, such as Hubble, after the comet’s discovery.
How near to Earth will the comet get?
According to NASA astronomers, the comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein follows an elliptical orbit that takes 3 million years to complete. It moves as far as half a light-year away from the Sun at one point in the orbit. Currently, the comet is approximately 2 billion miles from the Sun on a nearly perpendicular plane to our solar system.
Although the huge comet is hurtling toward Earth, NASA tells us that it won’t come close enough to the planet and its trajectory. The comet’s orbit will never bring it closer than 1 billion miles away from the Sun, a slightly farther distance than that of Saturn.
Comet C/2014 UN271 will come within 1 billion miles of the Sun in 2031 – 9 years from now.
