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NASA Space

Hubble Telescope Confirms Largest Comet Nuclear Ever Seen (npr.org) 33

Posted by BeauHD from the new-record-holder dept.
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has confirmed the largest icy comet nucleus ever seen by scientists. NPR reports: The nucleus of comet C/2014 UN271 (Bernardinelli-Bernstein) is about 80 miles in diameter, which is larger than the state of Rhode Island, NASA says. The comet's nucleus is about 50 times larger than that of most comets, and its mass is estimated to be a gigantic 500 trillion tons.

Comet C/2014 UN271 was discovered by astronomers Pedro Bernardinelli and Gary Bernstein using archival images from the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. The comet has been observed since 2010, when it was 3 billion miles away from the sun, and has been studied since then. NASA says there was a challenge in measuring the comet's nucleus because it was too far away for the Hubble telescope to determine its size. Instead, scientists had to make a computer model that was adjusted to fit the images of the comet's bright light that they got from the telescope's data.

Despite traveling at 22,000 mph, the massive comet is still coming from the edge of the solar system. But NASA assures us that it will never get closer than 1 billion miles away from the sun -- and even then, that won't be until 2031. The previous record-holder for largest comet nucleus was discovered in 2002. Comet C/2002 VQ94 was approximately 60 miles across.
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Hubble Telescope Confirms Largest Comet Nuclear Ever Seen More

Hubble Telescope Confirms Largest Comet Nuclear Ever Seen

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  • Unfortunate typo in title (Score:5, Informative)

    by terbeaux ( 2579575 ) on Friday April 15, 2022 @05:07AM (#62448978)
    At the time of this comment the title is "Hubble Telescope Confirms Largest Comet Nuclear Ever Seen" The article specifically talks about "comet nucleus" not nulcear.

  • Only 75 miles, not as big as Texas... (Score:3)

    by dyfet ( 154716 ) on Friday April 15, 2022 @05:50AM (#62449008) Homepage

    Bruce Willis can stand down...

  • Don't think i've heard of or have seen nuclear comets before, in Hollywood movies or any other SF i recall reading (which admittingly isn't as much i should have).

  • Spellcheck. (Score:5, Funny)

    by splutty ( 43475 ) on Friday April 15, 2022 @06:43AM (#62449062)

    Spellcheck is Slashdot editors' worst enema.

  • it embiggens the smallest comets!

  • Rather misleading (Score:5, Interesting)

    by RockDoctor ( 15477 ) on Friday April 15, 2022 @08:31AM (#62449224) Journal
    No, not the title, but this bit :

    The comet has been observed since 2010, when it was 3 billion miles away from the sun, and has been studied since then.

    The comet was noticed in 2018 from archived images taken between 2014 and 2018 - which is why it got a 2014-designation. Further digging through the archives has since discovered previous images ("precoveries" in the field's lingo) which have improved the orbit calculation to the point that they could image it with Hubble (which has a very small field of view) and improve their estimates of the nucleus size.

    The unwritten cause for interest in this object is that it is exhibiting substantial cometary activity out between the orbits of Saturn and Uranus. That's not unprecedented ("Centaur" class bodies have been seen with cometary activity since ... ages ago. Mid-90s?), but it does suggest that this is a very fresh Oort cloud body on it's first (or very small number) entry to the inner solar system.

    I wonder how long it has been incoming, and could we work out which body triggered it's visit to the inner system? TFA suggests a million years ... and within that time interval we've had multiple stars [wikipedia.org] coming reasonably close to the Sun. To choose between them, I'd need to go and gather more data. But it's a very doable event, given what we know is the arrangement of bodies near the Solar system.

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by Opyros ( 1153335 )

      Mid-90s?

      Chiron [wikipedia.org] was discovered in 1977.

      • Chiron's "cometary activity" wasn't. Its coma was discovered in 1989 and its tail in 1993, so GP was only off by a few years - well within the confidence interval given by the question mark.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Opyros ( 1153335 )
          True, but Chiron was quickly thought of as at least cometlike. This paragraph is from Roger B. Culver's Astronomy, published in 1979:

          Asteroid or Comet? In November 1977, Charles Kowal of the Hale Observatories discovered an unusual object orbiting the sun with a 50.7-year period along an orbit whose distance from the sun ranges from 1.3 to 2.8 billion km. Thus, the new object, called Chiron, is closer to the sun than Saturn at perihelion and almost as far as Uranus at aphelion. The estimated diameter of Ch

          • I do remember the announcement of Chiron, when I was at school, and the discussion at the time of it's relationship to comet origins. But I knew that it was a considerable period of time after the discovery that the cometary activity was confirmed.

            But yeah, I could have looked it up, but no, I couldn't be bothered.

  • Nucular [youtube.com]

  • The end is near (Score:3)

    by sheph ( 955019 ) on Friday April 15, 2022 @10:31AM (#62449512)
    Great. Now we have nuclear comets. Might as well just end it.
  • I've been following closely the James Webb Telescope, which is an incredible marvel of engineering and it's capabilities are astounding. It's in position but not fully aligned or calibrated yet, so it's just about to get started, and is superior to Hubble in a lot of ways, mostly because it's designs include things we learned from Hubble.

    But Hubble isn't dead yet! It can still do great science which is just awesome.

  • For fucks sake! Give the velocity in km/s. It's the only measure that makes sense on that scale.

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