The mega-comet first spotted in 2021 is the largest ever seen according to observations by scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope.
“This is an amazing object, given how active it is when it’s still so far from the Sun,” said Man-To Hui of the Macau University of Science and Technology, Taipa, Macau, and the paper's lead author. “We guessed the comet might be pretty big, but we needed the best data to confirm this.”
His team used Hubble to take five photos of the comet on January 8, 2022. However, since it’s too far away to get a good photo of its nucleus they had to use the telescope’s images of a bright spike and build a computer model of the surrounding coma, adjusting it to fit Hubble’s images. They then compared the brightness of the nucleus to earlier radio observations from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array in Chile. to several other comets.
Comet Bernardinelli-Berstein was discovered last year by astronomers Pedro Bernardinelli and Gary Bernstein looking at old images from the Dark Energy Survey at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory, Chile. It was found in images dating back to 2010. An incredibly rare find, it was initially classed as a minor planet.
Its closest approach to the Sun won’t be until 2031, but it’s sure to be a a major talking point in astronomy until then. The next-biggest comet astronomers know of is now C/2002 VQ94, which had a 60 miles-wide nucleus when it was spotted in 2002.
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