All we know about the Bernardinelli-Bernstein comet, the largest one ever seen

What is the News?

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s(NASA) Hubble Space Telescope has confirmed that the huge Bernardinelli-Bernstein comet is indeed the largest icy comet nucleus ever seen by astronomers.

Note: Comets are cosmic snowballs of frozen gases, rock and dust that orbit the Sun.

What is Bernardinelli-Bernstein?

It is the largest icy comet nucleus ever seen by astronomers. It is also called the C/2014 UN271.

Discovered by: It was discovered by astronomers Pedro Bernardinelli and Gary Bernstein in archival images from the Dark Energy Survey at an astronomical observatory in Chile. It was discovered in 2010 and has been intensively studied since then.

Origin: The comet has been travelling towards the sun for over a million years, and it is believed to have originated in the Oort Cloud.

Note: Oort Cloud is a distant region of the solar system that is predicted to be the source of most comets. However, the Oort Cloud is still only a theoretical concept.

Features of Bernardinelli-Bernstein Comet

Diameter: It has an estimated diameter of almost 129 kilometres.

Nucleus: The nucleus of the comet is around 50 times larger than that of most known comets, and its mass is estimated to be around 500 trillion tonnes.

Temperature: It has an estimated temperature of minus 348 degrees Fahrenheit. This is warm enough to sublimate carbon monoxide (CO) from the surface to produce the dusty coma.

Source: This post is based on the article “All we know about the Bernardinelli-Bernstein comet, the largest one ever seen” published in The Hindu on 15th April 2022.