A comet with a nucleus larger than Rhode Island has been on a journey toward the Sun for more than a million years. The comet is 85 miles wide, and new observations from NASA's Hubble Space Telescope confirm that it is the largest comet nucleus ever observed. The comet is expected to make its closest approach to Earth in 2031. It won't be visible to the naked eye, but the visit to the inner solar system will allow for a thrilling opportunity to observe an Oort Cloud object up close.
A dirty snowball is a comet with a tail made up of gas and dust and a nucleus made of ice. Most comet nuclei measure a few miles across, but C/2014 UN271 has a nucleus that is 50 times larger than the ones normally found in comets. It has an estimated mass of 500 trillion tons, 100,000 times greater than a typical comet.
Astronomers Pedro Bernardinelli and Gary Bernstein discovered the comet. It was about 3 billion miles from the Sun, or about the distance of Neptune.
David Jewitt, a professor of planetary science and astronomy at the University, 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.
Astronomers have studied it with telescopes. Astronomers used Hubble to take pictures of a comet. The comet's record of largest nucleus ever observed was determined using the combined data.
The Oort Cloud is a theoretical shell that surrounds the Sun far beyond the orbits of the outermost planets. The Oort Cloud is believed to be where comets originate.
The comet follows a 3-million-year-long elliptical path around the Sun and has been falling towards the star for more than a million years. It will return to the far-off region from whence it came.
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