Published Wednesday, April 13, 2022 | 00:41
NASA has spotted a record-breaking large comet heading towards Earth.
Known as C/2014 UN271 (Bernardinelli-Bernstein), comet is traveling in this direction fast, traveling at 22,000 miles per hour, moving from the edge of the solar system toward Earth.
NASA explained that the icy inner core of the comet is huge and has a diameter of about 80 miles, and is 50 times larger than the core of most known comets, according to what was published by the British “The Independent”.
It is also believed to have a mass of about 500 trillion tons, which is 100,000 times greater than the mass of a typical comet found near the Sun.
However, scientists say we are perfectly safe, the comet may not get closer than a billion miles from the sun, even farther from Saturn, and not until 2031.
This object has been known since November 2010, at which point it was 3 billion miles from the Sun or the distance to Neptune. Since then, researchers have been looking to understand more about it, using telescopes in space and on Earth.
As part of this research, scientists used NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to estimate the comet’s size, revealing its massive size.
While the researchers thought the comet should be at least reasonably large, given how active it is even at a long distance from the sun, the new data came from five images taken earlier this year by Hubble.
However, measuring the size isn’t as simple as taking those pictures. Scientists have to distinguish a comet’s nucleus but these are too far from the images to be clear enough to tell the difference.