The nucleus of a comet found in 2014 is the most important ever noticed.
The “dirty snowball” on the middle of comet C/2014 UN271 is about 120 kilometers throughout, researchers report within the April 10 Astrophysical Journal Letters. That makes this comet — also referred to as Bernardinelli-Bernstein, after its discoverers — about twice as huge as Rhode Island, says David Jewitt, an astronomer at UCLA.
Though the comet is massive — and vastly bigger than Halley’s comet, which measures slightly greater than 11 kilometers throughout — it would by no means be seen to the bare eye from Earth as a result of it’s too distant, Jewitt says (SN: 12/14/15). The object is now about 3 billion kilometers from Earth. At its closest method in 2031, the comet will come no nearer to the solar than 1.6 billion kilometers, about the identical distance as Saturn.
Jewitt and colleagues sized up the comet with the assistance of latest pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope, mixed with pictures taken by one other group at far-infrared wavelengths. The evaluation additionally revealed that the comet’s nucleus displays solely about 3 % of the sunshine that strikes it. That makes the item “blacker than coal,” Jewitt says.
Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein takes about 3 million years to circle the solar in a extremely elliptical orbit. At its farthest, the comet could attain about half a light-year from the solar — about one-eighth of the space to the following nearest star.
The comet is probably going “just the tip of the iceberg” so far as undiscovered comets of this dimension go, Jewitt says. And for each comet this dimension, he suggests, there might be tens of hundreds of smaller objects circling the solar undetected.
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