The American space agency NASA has the largest comet ever observed. This celestial body, named Bernardinelli-Bernstein, is currently still far from Earth, but is heading our way. According to astronomer Theo Jurriëns of the University of Groningen (RUG), there is no reason to panic.
The comet, nearly 80 miles in diameter, was spotted years ago, but it took scientists a long time to study Bernardinelli-Bernstein more clearly. We don’t have to fear an impact on Earth, it turns out. “The comet will stay close to Saturn. And it won’t happen until 2031. Cosmically, Saturn is our backyard, but it’s not going to collide with Earth, so there’s absolutely no reason to worry.” , says Jurriens.
According to the astronomer, a comet is a kind of remnant of the origin of our solar system. “Our planets are formed from a disk around the sun and some of that remains. A comet is jokingly called a dirty snowball because it is a mixture of grit and ice. And they are extremely cold. Every now and then they come. fragments pass by and they will orbit within our solar system. That material is about 4.5 billion years old, so that says something about the history of our solar system. It is very interesting for scientists.”
In our solar system, Jupiter is especially attractive to comets. “That is the largest planet and therefore has a lot of gravity. You occasionally see a smaller comet impact on Jupiter,” Jurriëns knows. Yet our own planet cannot escape impacts either. “The last time was probably in 1908, the famous crater in Siberia, fortunately in an uninhabited area. That was probably some kind of glancing shot with the earth.”
Although Bernardinelli-Bernstein – named after the two discoverers of the comet – will leave our planet alone, Jurriëns does not rule out the possibility that the earth will be hit by another celestial body in the future. “You never know, of course. But then we are talking about smaller boulders in our solar system. If they are large, the chance that they will be discovered a bit earlier is also greater. The small ones burn up in our atmosphere, we don’t really suffer there. by.”
If a large comet ever hurtles towards our planet, there are scenarios ready to avert disaster. “But we’re going to try that out for the first time, because we haven’t done it before,” says Jurriëns. “You may be able to blast a comet with rockets. Another idea is to take them in tow.”