NASA announced Tuesday that its Hubble Telescope has detected the largest comet ever observed. Named Bernardinelli-Bernstein (or C/2014 UN271), this celestial object is 137 kilometers in diameter, breaking the record of C/2002 VQ94, which was nearly 100. Its weight is just as impressive, NASA speaks of 500 trillion tons.
Bernardinelli-Bernstein is currently moving at nearly 9,800 kilometers per second at the edge of our solar system. It will not approach within 1.6 billion kilometers of our sun, and therefore poses no danger to our planet.
The US space agency had already discovered this comet in 2010, “when it was 3 billion kilometers from the Sun, which is roughly the average distance of Neptune. Since then, it has been intensively studied by ground and space telescopes.“.