C / 2014 UN271, recognized as a comet giants, has an estimated diameter of about 80 miles, making it the largest in the US state of Rhode Island. The nucleus is about 50 times larger than that found in the heart of the most famous comets. Its mass is estimated to be 500 trillion tons, one hundred thousand times greater than the mass of a typical comet.
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It orbits the Earth at 22,000 miles per hour from the edge of the solar system. “But do not worry: the comet will not get closer to Earth than Saturn,” NASA wrote on Twitter. The space agency says the comet will never approach more than 1 billion miles from the sun, which will not be until 2031. The comet was discovered by astronomers Pedro Bernardinelli and Gary Bernstein in archival images from the Dark Energy Survey at the Cerro Tololo Observatory in Chile. It has been intensively studied by terrestrial and space telescopes since its discovery. “This is an amazing object, given how active it is when it is still so far from the Sun,” said Taipa Macau, lead author of the Man-To Hui paper at Macau University of Science and Technology. “We guessed the comet might be big enough, but we needed the best data to confirm it.” The Macau team used Hubble to take five photos of the comet in January. The previous record holder is Comet C / 2002 VQ94, with a core estimated to be 60 miles in diameter. Discovered in 2002 by Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR). © 2022 Bloomberg LP Bloomberg.com
