![]() Though too far away to be seen directly, the team identified the bright spot in the images as the comet’s nucleus. Hui and Jewitt’s team used Hubble to take five photos of the comet on January 8, 2022. The researchers found the comet is at least 130km in diameter. NASA Hubble Space Telescope observations were needed to see the solid “nucleus” of the comet behind the huge dusty shield enveloping it. “We guessed the comet might be pretty big, but we needed the best data to confirm this.” “This is an amazing object, given how active it is when it’s still so far from the Sun,” says lead author Man-To Hui from the Macau University of Science and Technology. “We’ve always suspected this comet had to be big because it is so bright at such a large distance. “This comet is literally the tip of the iceberg for many thousands of comets that are too faint to see in the more distant parts of the solar system,” Jewitt says. It was discovered by accident in 2010 by astronomers Pedro Bernardinelli and Gary Bernstein when it was nearly five billion kilometres from the Sun they came across it when studying archival images from the Dark Energy Survey at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile.Ī new study of the comet, published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, was co-authored by Professor David Jewitt of the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), US. The four billion-year-old comet has been falling toward the Sun for well over one million years. The gargantuan comet headed our way is called Comet C/2014 UN271. More on astronomy: Are mysterious temperature patterns on Neptune signs a GoT-style winter is coming? But at the head of every comet is a ball of ice and dust. When observed, comets have a characteristic tail, sometimes stretching millions of kilometres, made of ice and gas. They are now thought to exist in the hypothesised Oort Cloud – a vast reservoir of comets flung billions of kilometres beyond the farthest planets encircling the Sun. This time.Ĭomets are the icy remnants of the period of planet formation in the early solar system. This comet will only get as close as 1.6 billion kilometres from the Sun in 2031, so we’re in no danger. But don’t lock yourselves away in your bunkers just yet. And it’s the largest comet ever observed, weighing in at 500 trillion tonnes. Eyes to the monster slayer as we burst through a comet’s tailĪstronomers have detected a comet hurtling toward Earth at around 10 kilometres a second.Comet disintegrates as it passes too close to the Sun.Interstellar comets are more common than thought.Explainer: when is an asteroid a comet?. ![]()
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