Comet C/2014 UN271, discovered by astronomers Pedro Bernardinelli and Gary Bernstein, is officially the largest comet nucleus observed yet. NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope spotted this massive icy comet nucleus and it has an estimated diameter of approximately 80 miles across, making it larger than the state of Rhode Island. Its nucleus is about 50-times larger than those found at the heart of most known comets, with an estimated mass of 500 trillion tons.
The comet is hurtling towards us at 22,000 miles per hour from the edge of the solar system and is now less than 2-billion miles from the Sun. Fortunately, the object will never get closer than 1-billion miles away from the Sun by 2031, which is slightly farther than the distance of the planet Saturn. It has been falling toward the Sun for over 1-million years and is believed to be coming from the Oort Cloud.
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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 Man-To Hui, the paper’s lead author from the Macau University of Science and Technology.
