Channel: The Cosmos News

Category: Science & Technology

Tags: naked ayae comet visible 2022comet coming to earth 2022biggest comet ever foundsolar systemcomet close approach to earth 2022comet c 2014 un271 bernardinelli bernsteincomet bernardinelli-bernstein 2031when will comet bernardinelli-bernstein be visiblecometsbiggest comet ever discovered 2031megacomet headed to earthcomet coming to earth 2022 nasa

Description: #thecosmosnews NASA Just Confirmed The Largest Comet Ever Detected, And It's Truly Gargantuan The largest comet ever discovered has been traveling towards the Sun for over 1 million years, and its gigantic scale shines a light on the mysterious objects that make up one of the biggest structures in our Solar System. In a new study, astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope to confirm that the solid center of the giant comet C/2014 UN271 (Bernardinelli-Bernstein) is the largest comet nucleus ever detected. It measures a staggering 50 times larger than most known comets, at almost 140 kilometers wide (about 85 miles). However, that freakishly large size – or rather the apparent weirdness of it – might say more about us and our limited conception of comets than it does about anything else. C/2014 UN271 hails from the Oort Cloud: a gigantic, spherical scattering of icy objects proposed to surround the Sun at the deepest and most distant stretches of our Solar System (so far away, in fact, it's thought to extend at least a quarter of the way towards the next nearest star system, Alpha Centauri).