NASA Discovers The Largest Comet Ever – It’s Heading Towards Our Planet

NASA Discovers The Largest Comet Ever – It’s Heading Towards Our Planet
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It’s been just revealed that NASA managed to discover the largest comet ever. More than that, it seems that this one is heading straight toward earth. Check out the latest data on the subject below.

The latest news about the largest comet

Accoridng to the latest reports, NASA verified that the biggest comet ever detected has a diameter of around 85 miles and is now officially the largest comet ever spotted after Hubble Space Telescope studies.

“C/2014 UN271 (Bernardinelli-Bernstein (BB) was discovered in 2014 by two astronomers, Pedro Bernardinelli and Gary Bernstein, using Dark Energy Survey archived pictures,” according to official notes,

The same notes reveal that BB’s diameter was previously estimated to be between 62 and 124 miles, but NASA has officially verified the comet’s nucleus diameter to be 85 miles wide using the Hubble Space Telescope.

According to NASA’s blog, BB has surpassed the previous record-holder comet C/2002 VQ94. It’s important to note the fact that this has an approximate nucleus diameter of 85 miles.

NASA also made sure to add officially that the comet has been hurtling toward Earth for a million years and will pose no danger to the planet when it reaches its closest approach in 2031. The comet will come within a billion miles of Earth or around the distance between Earth and Saturn.

“This is an amazing object, given how active it is when it’s still so far from the Sun. We guessed the comet might be pretty big, but we needed the best data to confirm this,” said the paper’s lead author Man-To Hui of the Macau University of Science and Technology, Taipa, Macau.

“This comet is literally the tip of the iceberg for many thousands of comets that are too faint to see in the more distant parts of the solar system. We’ve always suspected this comet had to be big because it is so bright at such a large distance. Now we confirm it is,” according to David Jewitt, a professor of planetary science and astronomy at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).


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Rada Mateescu

Passionate about freedom, truth, humanity, and subjects from the science and health-related areas, Rada has been blogging for about ten years, and at Health Thoroughfare, she's covering the latest news on these niches.

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