Hubble Space Telescope Snaps Image of Largest Comet, an 80-Mile Icy Rock
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope recently snapped an image of the largest comet on record.
The space agency wanted to confirm the size of the comet, which has been dubbed Bernardinelli-Bernstein after the astronomers who discovered it. On Tuesday, NASA announced the comet’s nucleus—the central part of the comet—measures about 80 miles across, which is about 50 times larger than typical comets in our solar system.
In terms of total mass, Bernardinelli-Bernstein comes in at an estimated 500 trillion tons, which NASA says is a 100,000 times greater than standard comets found closer to the Sun.
“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, an astronomy professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, who co-authored the Hubble study on the comet, confirming its size.
The comet was initially estimated to be between 62 to 124 miles in size when astronomers first spotted the icy rock in archived images taken by the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile back in 2014.
In January, NASA used Hubble to take five photos of Bernardinelli-Bernstein. However, the object was too far away for the images to fully discern the comet’s nucleus. Instead, the images also picked up the comet’s coma, the cloud-like sphere around the icy body.
The coma results from the comet heating up as it travels closer to the Sun. So to remove the coma, astronomers created a computer model capable of nixing the intrusive glow from the images while leaving the nucleus intact.
According to NASA, the Bernardinelli-Bernstein comet is currently located at the edge of our solar system, traveling at 22,000 miles per hour. But don’t worry, it’ll never
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