The comet’s nucleus is about 50 times larger than that of most comets, and its mass is estimated at gigantic 500 trillion tons. “This comet is literally the tip of the iceberg for the many thousands of comets that are too dim to see in the most remote parts of the solar system,” said David Jewitt, a professor of planetary science and astronomy at the University of California, Los Angeles. , refers to an announcement. “We always suspected that this comet had to be big because it is so bright at such a distance. Now we confirm that it is,” Jewitt added. 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 ever since. NASA says there was a challenge in measuring the comet’s core because it was too far for the Hubble Telescope to determine its size. Instead, the scientists had to build a computer model that was adapted to match the comet’s bright light images taken from the telescope data. Despite traveling at 22,000 mph, the huge comet is still coming from the edge of the solar system. But NASA assures us that it will never approach more than 1 billion miles away from the sun – and even then, that will not be until 2031. The previous record holder for the largest comet nucleus was discovered in 2002. Comet C / 2002 VQ94 was approximately 60 miles in diameter. Copyright 2022 NPR. To see more, visit
