Hubble Confirms BIGGEST Comet EVER Discovered! | 10x Chicxulub

 

How odd is it for you when relatives that you've never met in your life visit your family for the first time super awkward am i right well earth is about to have such a visit too a primordial relative of our lovely planet is about to visit our home but don't worry unlike don't look up this guest is not going to annihilate all of us although it could do so quite easily Welcome to Science Reads and today let's

 talk about the gargantuan comet that's

 about to visit our solar system and

 could be the largest of its kind!

 this distant relative of the earth has been traveling towards our sun for a million years on its way to meet us humanity wasn't even a thing when this four billion-year-old grandpa started its journey towards our parents star a denizen of deep space this ginormous comet is among the oldest objects to enter our solar system comets are icy lego blocks

 that are left over from the early days of planet construction they were unceremoniously tossed out of the solar system in a gravitational sumo wrestling match among the massive outer planets these kicked out comets took up residence in the Oort cloud a vast reservoir of far-flung comets encircling the solar system many trillions of miles away in deep space thanks to the Hubble telescope astronomers confirmed that the solid center of the giant comet c 2014 un-271 also known as Bernardinelli Bernstein is the largest comet nucleus ever detected it measures a staggering 50 times larger than most known comets at almost 85 miles wide when we look at comets in the sky their spectacular multi-million mile long tail which makes them look like a skyrocket grabs our attention deceptively however the source of that tail is at the heart of the comet a solid nucleus of ice mixed with dust yep these amazing fireballs hurtling through space are actually secrets snowballs deceptive as ever am i right most comet nuclei measure a few miles across and so would fit inside the confines of a small town but this time hubble astronomers have uncovered a goliath comet c 2014 un-271 could be as big as 85 miles across over twice the width of the state of rhode island imagine if that thing crashed into our earth the ending would be much more devastating than in don't look up it would be something like what ultron tried to pull in the second avengers movie yeah you know that avengers movie we all like to pretend doesn't exist named after astronomers pedro bernardinelli and gary bernstein who discovered this behemoth in archival images from the dark energy survey at the cerro tololo inter-american observatory in chile the comet was first observed in 2010 near the orbit of neptune hubble's contribution played a crucial role in 2022 in confirming the previously made observations and to verify that this comet is definitely the undisputed heavyweight champion of known comments interestingly the return journey for this comet to its nesting ground will also take millions of years but first to finish with its visit it still has

 roughly 2 billion more miles to go

 see 2014 un-271 has its nesting ground located in the oort cloud this outermost layer of the solar system is a gigantic spherical scattering of icy objects surrounding our sun at the deepest and most distant reaches possible in fact the earth cloud's reach quite possibly extends at least a quarter of the way towards our nearest neighboring star system alpha centauri due to its gigantic and freakishly expansive nature mapping the oort cloud is difficult and thus our own cosmic fence is a huge hypothetical mystery for us however the oort cloud likes to play with our curiosity the oort club likes to tease us often by chucking something towards the sun from its place there in the solar system's remote cosmic hinterlands c 2014 un-271 is definitely the most massive hint the oort cloud has sent our way a hint that will help us to decipher the puzzle of the frozen pristine masses that make up its entirety comet bernard nelly bernstein follows a three million year long elliptical orbit taking it as far as roughly half a light year from the sun the comet is now less than two billion miles from the sun falling in a nearly perpendicular path to the plane of our solar system at that distance temperatures are only about minus 348 degrees fahrenheit yet that's warm enough for carbon monoxide to sublimate off the surface producing the dusty coma since the sighting of the comet in 2010 it's been intensively studied by ground and space based telescopes researchers were astonished by how active this comet has been despite its considerable distance from the sun and arrived at the conclusion that it has to be big really big to confirm this assumption they needed the best data possible and that's why the team turned to the hubble telescope the challenge in measuring this comet was in how to distinguish the solid nucleus from the huge dusty coma enveloping it the comet is currently too far away for its nucleus to be visually resolved by hubble that said the aging telescope may be getting close to its retirement age but the old man still has its uses even today the senior telescopes data was able to capture a bright spike of light at the nucleus's location a man named manto hui of the macau university of science and technology in taipa and his team of researchers used that data to develop a computer model of the surrounding coma and adjusted it to fit the hubble images next the glow of the coma was separated leaving behind the star-like nucleus the researchers then compared the brightness of the nucleus to earlier radio observations and voila the combined data was able to constrain the diameter and the reflectivity of the nucleus but you must be thinking what does all this mean the colossal comet is barreling its way at 22 000 miles per hour from the edge of the solar system but not to worry it will never get closer than 1 billion miles away from the sun which is slightly farther than the distance of the planet saturn and that won't be until the year 2031 so we can all take a collective sigh of relief as we're not going to die also we have nearly a decade to study this amazing member of our solar system's family and hubble's measurements have already given us astonishing revelations the surface of the nucleus of this icy fireball is huge much much bigger than hayley's comet which is a more frequent visitor to our skies and there's more to this story its

 very existence proves that comet c 2014

 un271 is just a wave hello from the vast ocean called the oort cloud and there are likely many more monsters out there for us to find there are presumably trillions of comets in the oort cloud and there's a good chance that comet c 2014 un-271 is not the biggest of the bunch hidden out there the york cloud's comets didn't actually form so far from the sun instead they were tossed out of the solar system billions of years ago by a gravitational pinball game among the massive outer planets when the orbits of jupiter and saturn were still evolving the far-flung comets only travel back towards the sun and planets if their distant orbits are disturbed by the gravitational tug of a passing star it's not that different from a strong wind shaking ripe apples on a tree making some of them fall to the ground comet c 2014 un-271's inward journey is helping us access the deep freeze samples of the composition of the early solar system preserved for billions of years the reality of the oort cloud is supported by theoretical modeling of the formation and evolution of the solar system the more observational evidence that can be gathered through deep sky surveys coupled with multi-wavelength observations the better astronomers will understand the work cloud's role in the solar system's evolution first hypothesized in 1950 by dutch astronomer jan ort the oort cloud remains technically a theory at this point because the innumerable comets that make it up are two faint and distant to be directly observed estimates for the oort cloud's mass vary widely reaching as high as 20 times earth's mass to give you an idea of just how far away and how vast it is it'll take the voyager missions about 300 more years just to reach the inner realm of the oort cloud moreover the voyager spacecraft will still need another 30 000 years on their journey before they completely pass through it this titanic comet will provide us a priceless insight into the size distribution of comets in the oort cloud and that will help us to map the total mass of this outermost boundary of our solar system better so please look up this is a once in a civilization event no really it's a once in the entirety of humanity event it's

 an opportunity to understand our cosmic

 neighborhood how it was formed and what lies around it tell us in the comments what else you think lies in the dark corners of the oort cloud