The Brazilian giant discovered is the largest ever

New Hubble Space Telescope images confirm this: megacomet C/2014 UN271 is the largest ever discovered. Its frozen core is about 140 km wide and has a mass of about 500 trillion tons.

According to NASA, it is about 50 times larger than a The ‘normal’ comet, heading towards the sun approaching the Earth. For comparison purposes, NewazThe one we recently visited is 5 km wide. Hale-Bopp is large, with a length of 50 km; The famous Halle 15 km.

The comet is also called Bernardinelli-Bernstein because one of its discoverers is Brazilian astronomer Pedro Bernardinelli. He and his American colleague Gary Bernstein, both of the University of Pennsylvania, identified C/2014 UN271 while searching the Image Archives for the Dark Energy Survey, a survey of the expansion of the universe.

“We’ve always suspected that this comet must be large, because it’s so bright at such a great distance. Now, we’ve confirmed that it is,” said David Jewett, a professor of planetary sciences and astronomy at the University of California. at Los Angeles (UCLA) and co-author of a new study confirming the size of a space object.

“This comet is literally the tip of the iceberg for thousands of others too faint to be seen in the farthest parts of the Solar System.” The previous record belongs to the C / 2002 VQ94, located in 2002, the diameter of the core is estimated at about 96 km.

Bernardinelli-Bernstein began its journey toward the Sun more than a million years ago, possibly from the hypothetical Oort Cloud, the farthest region in the Solar System, where billions of comets would be concentrated. Now, it is far from Earth, running at a speed of 35,405 km / h.

But do not panic: according to NASA, the closest point to our planet will be at a distance of 1.6 billion km in 2031. The solar system will cross between the orbits of Saturn and Uranus, without any risk of collision.

How do you calculate your size?

Bernstein’s first record of identifying the mysterious object was from the Cerro Tololo International Observatory in Chile in October 2014. At the time, it was 4.3 billion kilometers from the sun. Then a record older than 2010 was found.

At first, it was not possible to say whether it was really a comet or another body, such as a dwarf planet, in a comet-like orbit. Therefore it has been studied using a wide range of instruments, including ground and space telescopes such as Hubble.

Thus, it was possible to confirm, first of all, that it was a huge scale. Then the sheer size of this “dirty snowball” was calculated – the nickname comets receive because their cores consist primarily of lumps of ice, bits of rock, dust and other cosmic debris.

Today, “only” 3.2 billion kilometers from the Sun, its temperature is estimated to be freezing -211 ºc. But this is already hot enough to allow carbon monoxide to pass from a solid to a gas. This phenomenon, called sublimation, is what creates the comet’s “coma”: a colorful “hair” of dust and gas, enveloping the nucleus. The tail will only appear when it is closer to the sun.

“This is amazing, given how active it is when it’s still far from the sun,” said the lead author of the new study, Man-To Hui of the Macau University of Science and Technology. “We thought the comet could be very large, but we needed the best data to confirm that.”

His team used Hubble to take five images of the comet on January 8, 2022. The biggest challenge in calculating the size was distinguishing between a nucleus and a coma. Because the object is so far away, even a powerful space telescope cannot pinpoint it accurately.

The solution was to manipulate the data using computer modeling technology, which predicted the coma’s whereabouts, and compare the Hubble images with previous observations made by the ALMA (Atacama Large Millimeter/ Submillimeter Array) radio telescope in Chile.

In the process, they also discovered that the comet is darker than expected. “It’s big, and it’s blacker than charcoal,” Jewett said. The study was published yesterday (12), In the letters of the Astrophysical Journal.

rare visit

The Bernardinelli-Bernstein Pass is a unique opportunity to spy on the origins of the solar system and even life on Earth. The journey of this comet began billions of years ago, in the events and collision of space rocks that created the planets.

It’s very clean,” Bernardinelli told the Daily Beast. “Not much has happened to this body since it was formed in the beginning of the solar system. So we can consider it a window into the past.”

The other comets we’ve recorded here have already changed a lot over time—either because they were too small or fragmented, or because they passed close to the Sun and changed their composition with heat. So our understanding has been “modified” by outside forces.

Given its sheer size, the 2014 UN271 has enough oomph to hold it together on its journey.

“The story this comet tells will tell us what was here billions of years ago, and we can use that to understand the things we see across the solar system today,” Bernardinelli added.

Everything indicates that they retain the properties and chemical state of the gas and dust cloud that formed our system, about 4.5 billion years ago. After this visit, he will return to the icy darkness, on a journey of thousands of years to the Oort cloud, which is two trillion kilometers from the sun.

Just don’t expect a heavenly show. The object may not be visible to the naked eye. But it can produce beautiful images from telescopes and observatories around the world, in addition to being a unique opportunity for astronomers to study an object that comes from the depths of the solar system.