C/2014 UN271, the largest comet ever observed by astronomers, has an estimated diameter of about 80 miles, with NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope confirming that “it is larger than the US state of Rhode Island.” The nucleus is about 50 times larger than that found in the center of most known comets and its mass is estimated to be 500 trillion tons, a million times larger than the mass of a typical comet.
First observed in 2010, the comet is moving toward Earth from the edge of the Solar System at 22,000 mph. but NASA Emphasizing that there is nothing to worry about because “the comet will not come any closer to Earth than Saturn. It has been calculated that the comet will be no more than 1 billion miles away from the Sun, which will not happen until then.” till the year 2031.
C/2014 UN271 was discovered by astronomers Pedro Bernardinelli and Gary Bernstein in archival images from the Dark Energy Survey at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. Since then, it has been extensively studied.
“This is an amazing object, considering how far it still is from the Sun,” said paper lead author Man-Too Hui from the Macau University of Science and Technology in Taipa Macau. “We hypothesized that the comet might be very large, but we need the best data to confirm this.” The Macau team used Hubble to take five photos of the comet in January.
The previous record-holder is comet C/2002 VQ94, whose nucleus is estimated to be 60 miles across. It was discovered in 2002 by the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) project.
(with inputs from agencies)