It was already suspected to be larger than other comets, but now those suspicions have been confirmed: Comet C/2014 UN271 (Bernardinelli-Bernstein) is the largest ever.
The American space agency NASA reports this on the basis of observations from the Hubble Space Telescope. About 129 kilometers in diameter, the comet’s icy nucleus is about 50 times larger than the most well-known comets. Its mass is estimated at 500 trillion tons, a whopping one hundred thousand times larger than average.
Although the comet’s nucleus is estimated to be about 137 kilometers across, it is so far away that it cannot be accurately determined by Hubble. The size is derived from the reflection of the sunlight that could be measured. ‘The core is estimated to be as black as charcoal. The core area is derived from radio observations,” it reads in a statement press release†
“This comet is literally the tip of the iceberg of many thousands of comets that are too faint to be seen in the more distant parts of the solar system,” said David Jewitt, co-author of a new study that measures the comet’s size. and professor of planetary science and astronomy at the University of California (UCLA) confirms in the NASA statement. ‘We have always suspected that this comet must be large because it is so bright at such a great distance. Now we confirm that this is the case.’
The colossal comet C/2014 UN271 has been heading toward the sun for over 1 million years. It is currently far from Earth, but is approaching us from the edge of the solar system at about 35,405 kilometers per hour. ‘But do not worry. Bernardinelli-Bernstein will never get closer than 1.6 billion kilometers from the sun — slightly further than the planet Saturn — and that won’t be until the year 2031,” NASA said.
The previous record holder was comet C/2002 VQ94, which had a nucleus estimated to be 96 kilometers across. It was discovered in 2002 by the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) project. Comet C/2014 UN271 was discovered by astronomers Pedro Bernardinelli and Gary Bernstein in archival footage from the dark energy study of the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. The comet was first sighted by accident in November 2010, when it was a whopping 4.8 billion kilometers from the sun. Since then, the ‘whopper’ has been intensively studied by telescopes on the ground and in space.
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