Photo: NASA, ESA, MAN-TO HUI (UNIVERSITY OF MACAU) / Courtesy
A comet with a nucleus 50 times larger than normal is headed near Earth at .000 kilometers per hour.
NASA’s Hubble Telescope has determined that the comet’s icy nucleus has a mass of about 500 billion tons and has 137 km wide, larger than the US state of Rhode Island.
But don’t worry. The closest it will get is to 1,600 millions of kilometers from the Sun, and that will not be until 2031.
He was first seen in 675 , but only now has Hubble been able to confirm its existence.
And it’s bigger than any comet astronomers have seen before.
“We always suspected this comet had to be big because it’s so bright at such a great distance,” said David Jewitt, professor of planetary science and astronomy. at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA). “Now we confirm that it is.”
NASA, which describes the icy ball as a giant “precipitating in this direction”, has called it Bernardinelli-Bernstein after its discovery by astronomers Pedro Bernardinelli and Gary Bernstein.
They saw it for the first time while working at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile more than a decade ago when I was more than 4,800 million kilometers from the Sun.
NASA describes comets as icy “Lego blocks”, leftover from the early days of planet building.
“They were expelled no frills of the Solar System in a game of gravitational pinball between the massive outer planets,” he said in a statement.
“The ejected comets They settled in the Oort Cloud, a vast re servorium of distant comets that surround the Solar System”.
Man-To Hui, from the University of Science and Technology of Macao, described the comet as “an amazing object” and added: “We assumed that the comet could be quite large, but we needed the best data to confirm it.”
Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein has been following an elliptical orbit of 3,000 million years, taking it as far from the Sun as about half a light year.
The comet is now less than 3,200 millions of kilometers from the Sun, falling almost perpendicular to the plane of our Solar System.
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