Story at a glance
- NASA discovered the largest icy comet ever seen by astronomers.
- It’s estimated to be larger than the state of Rhode Island.
- The comet has been traveling at 22,000 miles per hour from the edge of the solar system.
NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope spotted the largest icy comet nucleus ever seen by astronomers, as it inches closer to the Sun and offers scientists a closer look.
Named cometC/2014 UN271 (Bernardinelli-Bernstein), the icy giant has been traveling 22,000 miles per hour from the edge of the solar system. It’s estimated to have a diameter of approximately 80 miles across— making it larger than the state of Rhode Island.
The nucleus of the comet is about 50 times larger than found at the heart of most known comets, according to NASA, and its mass is estimated to be 500 trillion tons. That’s a hundred thousand times greater than the mass of a typical comet found much closer to the Sun.
Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein was first identified in 2019 by astronomers Pedro Bernardinelli and Gary Bernstein in Chile. At the time, the comet was 3 billion miles away from the Sun, about the average distance to Neptune.
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Since then, the icy comet has been intensely studied, and on Jan. 8 scientists used NASA’s Hubble to take five new photos of it.
They found that comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein is now less than 2 billion miles from the Sun, falling nearly perpendicular to the plane of the solar system. Temperatures at that distance are only about minus 348 degrees Fahrenheit but still warm enough for carbon monoxide to sublimate off the surface to produce a dusty coma.
“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. 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 ” said David Jewitt, a professor of planetary science and astronomy at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).
Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein has been falling towards the Sun for more than 1 million years, coming from the hypothesized nesting ground of trillions of comets, called the Oort Cloud. NASA says the cloud’s comets were tossed out of the solar system billions of years ago by a gravitational “pinball game” among the massive outer planets — when the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn were still evolving.
“The far-flung comets only travel back toward the Sun and planets if their distant orbits are disturbed by the gravitational tug of a passing star—like shaking apples out of a tree,” said NASA.
The new findings on comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein were made possible by one of NASA’s oldest operating missions, the Hubble Space Telescope. Its capabilities have grown significantly since it was first launched and deployed in 1990, making more than 1.5 million observations over the course of its lifetime.
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