New Delhi: A giant comet, one of the biggest ever detected, is racing through our Solar System at an alarming speed. The comet, called Bernardinelli-Bernstein, has a surface-equivalent diameter of about 137 kilometres, according to a new study.
The study, conducted by researchers from France and Spain, will be published in the journal, Astronomy & Astrophysics.
Bernardinelli-Bernstein Is 15 Times Taller Than Mount Everest
With a diameter of around 137 kilometres, the comet measures 15 times taller than Mount Everest, which has an elevation of 8,848.86 metres, or around 8.85 kilometres. Mount Everest's peak is one of the highest points on Earth.
According to an article published by indy100, an online sister newspaper of British online newspaper The Independent, the comet is almost unfathomably large and difficult to comprehend, and is six times larger than the comet which caused the extinction of the dinosaurs about 65 million years back.
All About Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein
Bernardinelli-Bernstein will not come within a billion miles of Earth, the article said. The object was discovered as part of the search for outer solar system objects with the Dark Energy Survey, the study said. The announcement of the object was made on June 19, 2021.
Bernardinelli-Bernstein is the prominent archetype of distant comets, whose activity is driven by hypervolatiles (compounds such as carbon monoxide and methane), according to the study.
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It is by far the largest Oort Cloud object ever found, and is almost twice as large as comet Hale-Bopp, according to the study. Oort Cloud is a predicted collection of icy objects farther away than everything else in the solar system, and lies far beyond Pluto and the most distant edges of the Kuiper Belt, according to NASA. Oort Cloud is believed to be the origin of many comets.
Comet Hale Bopp was an unusually bright comet that flew close to Earth in 1997, and was one of the brightest comets to reach the inner solar system in recorded history, according to NASA.
Dubbed the great comet of 1997, Hale Bopp was a record-breaking comet, with the largest well-measured cometary nucleus known after comet 95P/Chiron. Appearing 1,000 times brighter than Halley's Comet did at the same distance, Hale-Bopp was a very special comet, because comets typically do not shine so brightly when they are beyond Jupiter's orbit, according to EarthSky.
As Bernardinelli-Bernstein will approach and pass perihelion, which is the point nearest to the Sun in the path of an orbiting celestial body, monitoring of dust and gas emission will permit to study the comet's activity pattern and compare it to the distant activity of Hale-Bopp, the authors noted in the study.
Quoting Samantha Lawler, an astronomer at the University of Regina who was not involved in the research, the indy100 article said that the comet is huge, and is by far the biggest comet that has ever been discovered.
When Was The Comet First Spotted?
The comet was first inadvertently spotted by astronomers during a survey of galaxies in the deep cosmos back in 2014, the article said. Observations were performed on August 8, 2021, at a distance of 20 astronomical units or almost three billion kilometres from the Sun, according to the study.
The comet is heading towards a perihelion of almost 11 astronomical units, or 1.62 billion kilometres, in 2031, according to the study. This is the distance between Earth and Saturn.
The "thermal flux" of the comet yields the comet's surface equivalent surface diameter, according to the study. Then, the albedo, which is the proportion of light reflected from the surface of an astronomical object, is determined from the usual relationship between the diameter and the H magnitude, which is the visual magnitude an observer would record if the asteroid were placed one astronomical unit away from the Sun and at zero phase angle.
Meanwhile, a recent study conducted by researchers at University of Cincinnati, United States, suggests that a near-Earth comet may have resulted in the rapid decline of the Hopewell culture, an ancient pre-Columbian Native American civilisation. The falling debris from the comet created a devastating explosion over North America, 1,500 years ago.