A comet 4 billion years old and 80 miles wide is heading toward Earth

An ancient comet, more than 4 billion years old, is heading toward Earth. The massive comet is at least 80 miles wide, twice the width of Rhode Island. It is currently heading toward Earth at 22,000 miles per hour.

This ancient comet is the largest comet ever discovered

The comet in question is currently moving toward Earth at 22,000 miles per hour. It flows inward from the edge of our solar system. Fortunately, you don’t have to worry about the comet’s impact on Earth. Astronomers say it will never get closer than a billion miles from the sun. This is a little further than the distance between Earth and Saturn.

An ancient comet is expected to pass this close to Earth in 2031. This means we still have a few years to worry about this ancient celestial body at all. However, it is always interesting to know when comets and asteroids approach us.

David Jewett, professor of planetary sciences and astronomy at UCLA, co-authored a study on the comet. Jewett and colleagues published the study in Astrophysical Journal Letters. He says that objects like this ancient comet were “kicked out” from the solar system centuries ago.

The comets then settled in the Oort Cloud, Jewett says, a broad group of distant comets that orbit our solar system. Then other comets, like this ancient comet, orbit the solar system billions of miles in space.

Meet Comet C/2014 UN271

Aside from heading toward Earth, there’s one more thing that makes this ancient comet intriguing. On the other hand, astronomers say that this comet has the largest nucleus of any comet we have seen so far. They determined the size of the core using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. They currently estimate the comet to be up to 85 miles in diameter.

Comet C/2014 UN271 was first observed by Pedro Bernardinelli and Gary Bernstein. It was first observed by astronomers in 2010. At that time, the ancient comet was 3 billion km from the Sun. It is now less than 2 billion miles from the sun. Jewett says it will continue on its current loop until it finally returns to the Oort cloud in a few million years.

Judit says This ancient comet is “bigger and darker than coal”. The team estimates that the comet weighs about 500 trillion tons. This is 100,000 times the mass of a typical comet found near the Sun.

Of course, this is not the first unusual comet discovered by astronomers. Previously observed by NASA This comet and its radioactive aura. astronomers too Find Guilty In a place they had never seen before.

“This comet is literally the tip of the iceberg of several thousand comets too faint to be seen in the farthest reaches of the solar system,” said David Jewett, professor of planetary sciences and astronomy at the University of California, Los Angeles. Angelis (University of California) and co-author of New study at Letters from the Astrophysical Journal. “We always suspected that this comet must be large because it is so bright at such a great distance. Now we confirm that it is.