Comet ‘C/2014 UN271’ Hubble Space Telescope observation image and nuclear image with coma removed. Courtesy of NASA
The largest comet observed in astronomy history. Comet ‘C/2014 UN271’ is the size of 15 Mount Everest combined and has a mass of 500 trillion tons. The core, the nucleus, is more than 50 times larger than that of a normal comet.
According to an international research team led by Dr David Juytte, a professor of planetary science and astronomy at the University of California, Los Angeles, USA on the 12th (local time), the comet is currently entering our solar system.
Measured by the Hubble Space Telescope, the super-large comet ‘C/2014 UN271’ has a core diameter of 136 km and is currently moving toward the sun at a speed of 35,200 km per hour.
The comet is expected to approach the Sun by regarding 1.6 billion km, slightly more than the distance between Earth and Saturn, around 2031, and then return to the ‘Oort Cloud’, where long-period comets are gathered at the end of the solar system.
The Oort Cloud, a ball-shaped comet cloud, has not been confirmed by direct observation, but astronomers believe it to be the source of all long-period comets and Halley’s comets entering the center of the solar system, as well as numerous Centaurus and Jupiter comets. there is.
Comet ‘C/2014 UN271’ was first discovered by chance in 2010 from a distance of regarding 4.8 billion km. Since then, intensive observations have been made through ground and space telescopes, but it is too far away to determine the size of the nucleus surrounded by a coma of dust and gas.
Then, on January 8, the University of California research team used the Hubble telescope to observe the comet, which is regarding 3.2 billion kilometers from the sun, and took five pictures. Since it was impossible to look into the nucleus only with visible light images, data with increased light at the location of the nucleus was used. The result was obtained by removing light from the coma around the nucleus using a computer model and combining it with radio data observed with the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Aggregation (ALMA) in the northern desert of Chile.
“This comet is the tip of the iceberg of numerous comets at the edge of the solar system that are not literally too faint to be seen,” said Professor Juyut. “This comet has been approaching the Sun in the Oort Cloud for over a million years, and will return to the Oort Cloud,” he added.
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