Giant Comet Found, Its Size is 1,000 Times Larger Than It Ever Was

Liputan6.com, Jakarta – Astronomers have discovered the largest known comet. Its size is about a thousand times bigger than the others.

Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein name, because it was discovered by students majoring in physics and astronomy University of Pennsylvania, Pedro Bernardinelli and Professor Gary Bernstein. The comet is between 62 and 124 miles (100-200 kilometers) wide. The team announced the discovery in June 2021, as reported by CNN, Wednesday (28/7/2021).

This unusual comet will be closest to the Sun in 2031. It takes a very large amateur telescope to see it.

This giant comet, also known as C/2014 UN 271, comes from the periphery solar system and have headed Sun for millions of years. This comet is the most distant comet discovered on its way in, which will give scientists the opportunity to observe and study it for years to come.

Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein was discovered in 6 years of data collected by the Dark Energy Camera, located on the Víctor M. Blanco 4-meter Telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile.

The data collected by the cameras is then fed into The Dark Energy Survey, a collaboration of more than 400 scientists in seven countries and 25 institutions.

The camera, also known as DECam, also helps map 300 million galaxies in the night sky. However, it also catches glimpses of 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 the National Center for Supercomputing Applications algorithm at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to identify the trans-Neptunian object. During their work, the astronomers tracked 32 detections to a single object.

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