Astronomers using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope have discovered the largest comet ever discovered – larger than Rhode Island – and it is in our solar system, the agency said Tuesday.
The giant comet can be “up to 85 miles in size” and is defined as the size of the “largest ice comet core” ever seen by astronomers, according to NASA. The comet or “C / 2014 UN271” was discovered by astronomers Pedro Bernardinelli and Gary Bernstein at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. The findings were published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters on Tuesday.
“This is an amazing object, given how active it is when it’s still so far from the sun,” NASA lead author Man-To Hui of the University of Macau said in a statement. “We guess the comet may be quite large, but we needed the best data to confirm that.”
His team used Hubble to take five pictures on January 8 and was able to capture a “bright light peak” in place of the comet’s nucleus. Combined with data from the radio telescope, they were able to estimate the size of the giant comet.
The left photo shows the photo taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. The coma (middle panel) is obtained by mounting the surface brightness profile assembled from the left image. The coma was removed and she revealed the nucleus in the third photo (right). SCIENCE: NASA, ESA, Man-To Hui (Macau University of Science and Technology), David Juit (UCLA) IMAGE PROCESSING: Alice Pagan (STScI)
The comet is moving at 22,000 miles per hour since the end of the solar system and is now less than 2 billion miles from the sun, NASA said. But scientists have said it will never approach the sun at a distance of 1 billion miles and will not reach 2031.
David Juitt, a professor of planetary science and astronomy at the University of California, Los Angeles, co-authored the study. He said in a press release that the discovery of the comet could be a sign of many other things.
“This comet is literally the tip of the iceberg for many thousands of comets that are too faint to be seen in the farther parts of the solar system,” Juit said. “We’ve always suspected that this comet must be big because it’s so bright at such a great distance. Now we confirm that it is.”
The comet was first observed in 2010, when it was 3 billion miles from the sun, NASA said. The agency says the comet has been in the sun for more than 1 million years and comes from the Oort Cloud, a theoretical nesting site for trillions of comets. NASA’s Voyager spacecraft is not expected to reach the Oort cloud for another 300 years and could take up to 30,000 years to cross, NASA said.
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Christopher Brito
Christopher Brito is a social media producer and fashion writer for CBS News, focusing on sports and stories that include issues of race and culture.
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