The Hubble telescope confirms the largest comet nucleus ever seen by astronomers

This sequence shows how the nucleus of the comet was isolated from the dust and gas surrounding it. On the right is a photo of the comet taken by the Hubble Space Telescope. A model of the coma was obtained by fitting the surface brightness profile assembled from the left image.

Space Telescope Science Institute/Macau University of Science and Technology

The Hubble Space Telescope confirmed the largest comet nucleus ever seen by scientists. The nucleus of the C/2014 UN271 is 80 miles in diameter, which is larger than the state of Rhode Island.

The nucleus of the comet is 50 times larger than most comets and it has a mass of 500 trillion tons.

David Jewitt, a professor of planetary science and astronomy at the University of California, Los Angeles, said that this comet is 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.

The comet is so bright that we thought it had to be big. Jewitt said that they confirm it is.

Astronomers Pedro Bernardinelli and Gary Bernstein discovered the comet using archival images from the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory. The comet was observed in 2010 when it was 3 billion miles away from the sun.

The Hubble telescope was not able to determine the comet's size because it was too far away. Scientists had to make a computer model that was adjusted to fit the images of the comet they got from the telescope.

The comet is still coming from the edge of the solar system despite traveling at 22,000 mph. NASA assures that it will never get closer than 1 billion miles from the sun.

The largest comet nucleus was discovered in 2002. The comet was 60 miles across.