The NASA team of scientists confirmed this through an analysis from the Hubble Telescope The largest comet ever discovered. It is Bernardinelli-Bernstein, with a core of around 500 billion tons and a width of 137 kilometers.
According to research published in Astrophysical Journal Letters, the core of this comet 50 times larger than known comets. Its mass, meanwhile, is one hundred thousand times larger than the mass of an ordinary comet closest to the Sun.
Even if you move close to the earth at a speed of 35,000 kilometers per hour, It will be 1600 million kilometers away from the sunIt will happen in 2031.
There was the comet Originally discovered By astronomers Pedro Bernardinelli and Gary Bernstein 10 years ago When he worked at the Cero Dololo Inter-American Laboratory in Chile, it was 4.8 billion kilometers from the sun.
The top of the iceberg
“It simply came to our notice then This comet must be large Because it’s so bright at such a long distance. We confirm it now. “ Said David Juvid, professor of planetary science and astronomy at UCLA.
According to the expert, “This comet really does exist The tip of the glacier to many thousands of very faint comets Should be found in the most remote parts of the solar system.
Mann-du Hui, a lead author who received his doctorate from UCLA in 2019 and now works at Macau University of Science, said it was “a fantastic subject, how active it is when it’s still far from the sun.” Technology in Taiba, Macau.
The comet is present Less than 3 billion kilometers from the sun And in a few million years it is expected to return to its breeding ground in the Oort cloud.
How was the size calculated?
To determine the size, the researchers used a telescope Hubble: First they took Five images of the comet, January 8, 2022, then incorporated previous radio observations.
They agreed that the challenge of measuring this comet was to determine the fixed center of the large dusty coma, surrounded by a cloud of dust and gas that the comet is currently too far away to visually solve the center.
Hui and his colleagues create a spike of bright light in the Hubble data center Calculation model The surrounding coma and then adjusted it to match the hubble images. Finally, They used the glow of the commaLeave the center.
Hui and his team compared the brightness of the city center with previous radio observations. From the Atacama Large Millimeter / Submillimeter Series or ALMA in Chile.
The new Hubble measurements are closer to previous ALMA size estimates, but strongly recommend a darker core surface than previously thought. “It’s bigger than coal and black”In Juvid.
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