The 85-mile-wide Bernardinelli-Bernstein comet is winging its way toward the interior of the solar system.
and now accepted for publication in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics Letters, bumps the Hale-Bopp comet from the top spot. Hale-Bopp was discovered in 1995 and became visible to the naked eye in 1996; it was about 46 miles across., also known as comet 2014 UN271, has now been calculated to be about 85 miles across.
The Bernardinelli-Bernstein comet is named after its discoverers, University of Pennsylvania cosmologist Gary Bernstein and University of Washington postdoctoral scholar Pedro Bernardinelli, whoin the Dark Energy Survey dataset. The images showing the comet date back to 2014, which is why that year is in the comet's official scientific designation. Bernardinelli and Berstein noticed the tiny dot moving as they studied images from subsequent years.
At that time, the comet was too distant for researchers to get a good gauge on its size, though they could tell it was likely quite large. The comet hails from the Oort Cloud, a cloud of chunks of ice and rock hovering at the edge of the. Its orbit takes it as far as a light-year from the sun — and takes 5.5 million years to complete.
The comet is currently winging its way toward the interior of the solar system. It will get closest to Earth in 2031, though not too close for comfort: The comet will remain just outside Saturn's orbit,
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