The Hubble Space Telescope has detected the largest comet ever seen.
The comet in question is C/2014 UN271 or Bernardinelli-Bernstein which spans about 129 sq km. As an illustration of how large the object is, it is equivalent to the area of West Jakarta which is only 124.4 square km.
In fact, the United States Space Agency (NASA) revealed that the comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein has a nucleus 50 times larger than the average comet.
"This comet is truly the tip of the iceberg for thousands of comments that are too faint to see in the more distant parts of the Solar System," said David Jewitt, an astronomer at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). 4/2022).
"We always thought this comet was large, because it is very bright at such a great distance. Now we are confirming it," he continued.
For the citizens of Earth please calm down, this comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein will not threaten. Because the distance of the object that glides at a speed of 33,500 km / h is far from this planet.
NASA says comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein has been heading toward the Sun for more than a million years. The closest to Earth is about 1.6 billion km, which will not be reached until 2031.
Prior to naming Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein the largest today, the size of the jumbo comet was pinned to C/2002 VQ94 seen in 2002 which is estimated to have a diameter of 96 km.
The Origin of the Name Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein
This new giant comet was first observed in 2010. Several years later, astronomers Pedro Bernadinelli and Gary Bernstein discovered the object in archival data collected by the Dark Energy Survey at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile.
Since its discovery, the comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein has been studied with a variety of instruments, including using air telescopes and space telescopes such as Hubble.
The comet is also nicknamed the 'dirty snowball' because it is made up of rock, ice and other debris. Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein's orbital point is about 3.2 billion km from the Sun, where it is about minus 211 degrees Celsius.
The space telescope, Hubble, detected a comet the size of the largest ever seen, namely C/2014 UN271 or Bernardinelli-Bernstein which stretches about 129 kilometers. Photo: NASA
Although very cold, the temperature is warm, because it allows carbon monoxide to sublimate, a process of solid material into gas from the surface of the comet's rock.
"We suspect the comet may be quite large, but we need the best data to confirm this," the researchers said.
In the end, his team used Hubble to take five photos of the comet on January 8, 2022 and proved that comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein is the largest today. It is not impossible that there are other space objects that are even bigger than the comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein.