Size of largest comet ever seen confirmed by Hubble telescope

This Tuesday (12), United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) It confirmed the size of the largest comet humanity has ever seen. This Icy comet with a diameter of about 128 kilometers observed Hubble space telescope. According to the space agency, the comet has the largest nucleus ever analyzed by astronomers, about 50 times larger than most known comets.

C/2014 The flying object UN271 (Bernardinelli-Bernstein) has a mass of 500 trillion tons and is traveling at 32,000 kilometers per hour — the discovery was made in 2010 by astronomers Pedro Bernardinelli and Gary Bernstein. Its size is about 100,000 times the mass of a typical comet located close to the Sun.

“This comet is literally the tip of the iceberg of thousands of comets that are too dim to see in the farthest reaches of the solar system. We always suspected this comet must have been large because it was so bright at such a great distance,” says a new study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. “We’ve now confirmed that it is,” said co-author David Jewitt.

Comet heading to Earth?

It is important to note that for now the comet poses no danger to Earth as it cannot come less than 1.6 billion kilometers from the Sun – the maximum proximity will be in 2031, when it reaches close. Saturn.

The record-breaking comet up to that time was C/2002 VQ94, with a 96-kilometer diameter core discovered by the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) project in 2002.

C/2014 UN271 was approximately 3 billion kilometers from the Sun when it was discovered in November 2010. It’s a little closer now, so Hubble was able to gather information about the comet’s bright light and compare the data with previous observations.