Jakarta, CNN Indonesia —
Recent studies state comet giants will fly close to Earth in the next 10 years after the last known approach 3.5 million years ago.
The comet is named Bernardinelli-Bernstein, after its discoverer, Pedro Bernardinelli and Professor Gary Bernstein, of the University of Pennsylvania, United States.
Previously when this comet first appeared it was called UN271 2014, because the object appeared in a survey conducted in 2014. At that time the comet was estimated to be between 100 and 379 kilometers in size.
Bernardinelli and Bernstein did an in-depth investigation to observe its movement then they found this comet in June.
At the discovery, the research team called this comet at least 100 kilometers wide, which makes it 1,000 times larger than most comets.
This size even makes some astronomers mistake this comet as a dwarf planet.
Despite its enormous size, this comet will only look like Pluto in the night sky, so observations of this comet will still require a telescope.
Reported from Space, researchers call this comet moving fast through the Oort Cloud (a vast region of icy rock), billions of kilometers from Earth (towards the solar system).
In addition, researchers found this comet has a flaming tail which is commonly called a coma. This indicates that the comet is a type of ice that is approaching warm regions such as the solar system.
Quoted from National Geographic, the comet will be at its closest on January 21, 2031. At that time it is estimated that the comet is at a distance of 1.5 billion kilometers from the Sun, slightly further than the average distance from the Sun to Saturn.
Then after that, this comet will move out of the solar system, but will remain visible until at least the 2040s.
This comet is said to have a very long trajectory that takes millions of years to orbit the Sun.
Bernardinelli and Bernstein discovered this comet when it was still 2.7 billion miles or about 4.4 billion kilometers. This distance is the record for the furthest comet ever found.
Dark Energy Camera
Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein was discovered in six years through data collected by the Dark Energy Camera, the 4-meter Víctor M. Blanco telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile.
The data collected by the camera was entered into The Dark Energy Survey, a collaboration of more than 400 scientists in seven countries and 25 institutions.
The camera, also known as DECam, helps map the 300 million galaxies in the night sky that capture comets and trans-Neptunian objects, or icy celestial bodies that lie along the periphery of the solar system, beyond Neptune’s orbit.
Bernardinelli and Bernstein used algorithms at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to identify trans-Neptunian objects.
(lnn / fea)
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