NASA astronomers have confirmed the discovery of the largest comet ever recorded and claimed that its trajectory is approaching our solar system.
The space object C/2014 UN271 was seen last year and observations from the Hubble Space Telescope confirmed this week the size of its nucleus. That is the solid central part of the comet composed of rock, dust and ice that is separated from its tail.
NASA said Tuesday that the core of C/2014 is about 130 kilometers in diameter, making it larger than the state of Rhode Island in the United States.
It is about 50 times larger than the heart of most known comets, with a mass estimated at a staggering 500,000 tons.
“The giant comet is headed here 22,000 miles per hour (NdR: 35,000 kilometers per hour) from the edge of the solar system,” NASA wrote on its website.
“But don't worry. It will not come closer than a billion miles from the Sun, which is a little farther than the distance from the planet Saturn. And that won't be until 2031,” they add.
Comet C/2014 was discovered by astronomers Pedro Bernardinelli and Gary Bernstein in archive images of the Inter-American Observatory Cerro Tololo in Chile.
It was first observed in November 2010 when it was almost as far from the Sun as Neptune.
Since then, it has been intensively studied by terrestrial and space telescopes as it moves towards the inner Solar System.
In the new analysis, a team led by David Jewitt, professor of planetary science and astronomy at the University of California, Los Angeles, calculated the size of C/2014 at the highest resolution yet.
To improve previous estimates, he used Hubble observations and models to isolate the nucleus from the comet's tail, or “coma”.
“We confirm that C/2014 UN271 is the largest long-period comet ever detected,” the team writes in its new article, which was published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Observations of the comet, which is believed to have emerged from a layer of icy objects that surround our Sun called the Cloud of Oort, could teach us a thing or two about the early universe.
Objects in the Oort Cloud are thought to be among the oldest in our star system, but they are notoriously difficult to examine because they are far away, far beyond Pluto.
“This comet is literally the tip of the iceberg of many thousands of comets that are too weak to see in the most distant parts of the solar system,” said Professor Jewitt.
“We've always suspected that this comet had to be big because it's so bright at such a great distance. Now we confirm that it is,” he concluded.
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