[New Tang Dynasty Beijing time April 16, 2022]NASA (NASA) released a press release on Tuesday (April 13) that the Hubble Space Telescope has observed the largest comet ever seen, and its icy core It weighs 500 trillion tons.
A comet consists of a coma, a tail, and a core composed of ice. Hubble discovered the comet, C/2014 UN271, with a nucleus up to 80 miles in diameter and a mass of about 500 trillion tons, making it the largest comet ever recorded.
The comet, also known as Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein, is a combination of the names of the two scientists who first discovered it in 2010.
But only now have scientists finally measured how big it is. That’s partly because it’s about 2 billion miles away from Earth, farther than Uranus is, and partly because it’s surrounded by a thick crust of gas and dust that trails a comet’s signature trail. comet tail.
By combining a wealth of Hubble observations, researchers at Macau University of Science and Technology were finally able to separate parts of the comet’s nucleus from its outer shell and calculate the exact mass of its core structure.
David Jewitt, one of the researchers, said in a news release: “It is very large and darker than carbon. We have long suspected that the comet is particularly large because it looks like it is very large from such a distance. It’s especially bright, and now that’s finally confirmed.”
For more than a million years, C/2014 UN271 has been heading closer to the sun. Calculations show that in 2031 it will be no closer to Earth than Saturn. But considering its size, this distance is quite close. At some point in the future, it will also fly away from the sun, and it will take about 3 million years for it to orbit the sun once.
Comets are a special class of celestial bodies made of ice and dust that orbit the sun. When they get close enough to the sun, a long comet tail trailing behind them is the hallmark feature of such objects. Sometimes, their comet tails are visible to the naked eye from Earth, a rare sight in the night sky.
Scientists are particularly concerned about comets in distant locations, because they think they spend most of their time at the edge of the solar system, in low temperature regions, and retain much of the original material from the early days of the solar system.
Even though they are often so far away from the sun that they are not affected by the sun’s heat at all, some comets are still active — constantly emitting gas and various substances that increase their brightness. Scientists have not known exactly what kind of mechanism this is. The now-discovered C/2014 UN271 is an excellent study object.
The research was published April 12 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
(Transfer from The Epoch Times/Editor-in-charge: Ye Ping)
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