Newly discovered comet is around 62 miles across

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Newly discovered comet is around 62 miles across

Postby Harvey » Wed Jul 21, 2021 10:43 pm

Astronomers spot first activity on giant megacomet beyond Saturn

By Elizabeth Howell

Image


Spotting the first signs of activity on a record-setting comet of gargantuan size came down to a time-zone advantage.

Astronomers in New Zealand were the first to spot a coma, or zone of gas and dust, spreading around the megacomet C/2014 UN271, also known as Bernardinelli-Bernstein, which may be 1,000 times more massive than a typical comet. It could be the most massive comet ever found in all of recorded history.

The team that monitors images captured by the Las Cumbres Observatory (LCO) is spread around the world, and images from one of LCO's 1-meter telescopes hosted at the South African Astronomical Observatory were available on June 23 at midnight EDT (0400 GMT). That happens to be afternoon in New Zealand.

"The other folks were asleep," recalled LCO team member Michele Bannister, of New Zealand's University of Canterbury, in a statementreleased Wednesday (July 14).

At first glance, however, she thought the new imagery was a bust, thanks to the ever-present problem of satellites going through the field of view of telescopes.

"The first image had the comet obscured by a satellite streak, and my heart sank," she continued. "But then the others were clear enough, and gosh: there it was, definitely a beautiful little fuzzy dot, not at all crisp like its neighboring stars."

What caught Bannister's attention was a foamy coma emerging at an incredible distance from the sun. When the image was taken, Bernardinelli-Bernstein was about 19 astronomical units (AU) from the sun. (One AU is the average Earth-sun distance — about 93 million miles, or 150 million kilometers). That's roughly double the orbital distance of Saturn from the sun. Solar energy at that juncture is a fraction of what we enjoy here on Earth.

That said, the comet has a lot of mass available to heat up. Bernardinelli-Bernstein's huge core (or nucleus) is estimated to be more than 62 miles (100 km) in diameter, which is three times as large as the next-known largest comet nucleus — that of Comet Hale-Bopp


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https://www.space.com/giant-comet-berna ... ond-saturn
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Re: Newly discovered comet is around 62 miles across

Postby drstrangelove » Thu Jul 22, 2021 10:52 am

I always wonder, for instance in the case of 99942 Apophis, would they even tell people if it was projected to hit.
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Re: Newly discovered comet is around 62 miles across

Postby Harvey » Thu Jul 22, 2021 3:02 pm

Until such time as it became common knowledge and fruitless to deny, probably not.

(Oh, btw, I very much enjoyed your arfticles, you posted one a day or so back (assumed it was yours, had your voice) , I read a few of the others too. Fine work.)
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Re: Newly discovered comet is around 62 miles across

Postby drstrangelove » Sat Aug 28, 2021 1:30 am

Thanks.

I want to get into soups. I like the idea of preparing a delicious soup through out the day. Have the soup going in the background, like the cricket, not really engaged in it but tending to it periodically. It's the kind of meal preparation I could get behind, because it deals with time in a completely different manner. Dinner is a time slot at the moment, and a time slot is a chore or task where everything is rushed.

Looking for a solid beginner soup to get started on.
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Re: Newly discovered comet is around 62 miles across

Postby Harvey » Sun Apr 17, 2022 5:50 pm

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-61097826

Nasa scientists spy 'largest comet ever seen'

Image

The image on the left shows the comet on 8 January, 2022. The right shows the 'coma' - an envelope around a comet's nucleus

A comet with a nucleus 50 times bigger than normal is barrelling towards Earth at 22,000 miles per hour.

Nasa's Hubble telescope has determined the comet's icy nucleus has a mass of about 500 trillion tonnes and is 85 miles (137km) wide - larger than the US state of Rhode Island.

But not to worry. The closest it will get is one billion miles away from the Sun, and that won't be until 2031.

It was first spotted in 2010 but only now has Hubble confirmed its size.

And it's larger than any comet ever seen by astronomers before.

"We've always suspected this comet had to be big because it is so bright at such a large distance," said David Jewitt, a professor of planetary science and astronomy at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). "Now we confirm it is."

Nasa describes the icy dirtball as a behemoth "barrelling this way".

According to a statement from the space agency, it 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.

Comets are described by Nasa as icy "Lego blocks," left over from the early days of planet construction.

"They were unceremoniously tossed out of the Solar System in a gravitational pinball game among the massive outer planets," it said in a statement.

"The kicked-out comets took up residence in the Oort Cloud, a vast reservoir of far-flung comets encircling the Solar System."

Man-To Hui, of the Macau University of Science and Technology, described the comet as "an amazing object", adding: "We guessed the comet might be pretty big, but we needed the best data to confirm this."

Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein has been following a three-million-year-long elliptical orbit, taking it as far from the Sun as roughly half a light-year.

The comet is now less than two billion miles from the Sun, falling nearly perpendicular to the plane of our Solar System.
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