NASA spots ‘record-breaking’ comet hurtling toward solar system Halley's Comet. [Provided by NASA/TNS)
It’s a 500 million-ton ball of ice and it’s headed this way. Fast.
NASA said Tuesday researchers had observed a record-breaking comet speeding toward the middle of the universe.
The space agency said it’s the biggest comet nucleus ever recorded with an estimated diameter of 80 miles. On the whole, it’s bigger than the state of Rhode Island.
The object, known as C/2014 UN271 (Bernardinelli-Bernstein), is about 100,000 times the size of the usual comets that approach our solar system and it’s been clocked at about 22,000 mph.
The comet is still about nine years away and isn’t expected to come within a billion miles of the sun — more than the distance between Earth and Saturn. After that it won’t return on its elliptical orbit for another 3 million years.
The comet’s features were sussed out from photographs taken by the Hubble Telescope, which orbits the Earth about every 97 minutes scanning the solar system and beyond.
Corresponding research from the ALMA telescope in Chile found that the comet was dark-colored, “blacker than coal,” on its surface dispute giving off a lot of light.
“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,” said David Jewitt, a professor of planetary science and astronomy at the University of California, Los Angeles, and co-author of the new study in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. “We’ve always suspected this comet had to be big because it is so bright at such a large distance. Now we confirm it is.”
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