Huge “comet” with a width of over 80 miles and a mass of 500 trillion tons, revealed the space telescope NASA Hubble.
According to the Daily Mail, the comet, named C / 2014 UN271, was first discovered in 2010, but its size was only confirmed today.
Its core – the comet’s solid center – is about 50 times larger than the nucleus of most known comets and is the largest NASA has ever located.
With a width of 80 miles, its core in particular is larger than its state Rhode Island and is about as wide as Wales.
While the comet is currently less than two billion miles away from the Sun and heading for Earth, fortunately NASA assures us that it is not a threat to us.
“It will never approach more than 1 billion miles farther from the Sun, which is a little further away from the planet Saturn. “And this will not happen until the year 2031”, said the NASA.
“We always suspected that this comet was big because it shines so far. “Now we confirm that it really is,” say the scientists.
“We guessed the comet might be big enough, but we needed more data to confirm it,” he added.
To verify its size, the team used NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to take five photos of the comet on January 8, 2022.
The orbiter is currently running in space at 22,000 miles per hour and is an “amazing object, given how active it is when it is still so far from the Sun,” according to Man-To Hui, the study’s lead author. of.
Daily Mail
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