Hubble Space Telescope, NASA said that they spotted the biggest comet ever recorded.
According to Newsweek, the comet’s nucleus, the icy object at the heart of the comet, which doesn’t include the tail… is thought to be 80 miles across and may weigh about 500 trillion tons.
The cold behemoth is called C/2014 UN271 or comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein. It was discovered in 2010 by astronomers Pedro Bernardinelli and Gary Bernstein.
The comet is about 2 billion miles away, further than the planet Uranus.
“It’s big, and it’s blacker than coal,” said David Jewitt, co-author of a study describing the finding, in a NASA press release. “We’ve always suspected this comet had to be big because it is so bright at such a large distance. Now we confirm it is.”
C/2014 UN271 is slowly heading towards the sun and has been for over 1 million years, but it won’t pose any danger to Earth. In fact, it’s not predicted to get any closer than the planet Saturn in 2031. But, given its size, that’s perhaps close enough.
