The core of the largest icy comet ever seen has been detected by NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. PAN. As calculated, the comet’s core has an extension of 128,748 km wide, that is, about 80 miles in diameter, 50 times larger than average. Also, its mass is about 500 billion tons, which is 100 times greater than the average of other comets.

The Hubble Telescope photos were taken on January 8, 2022, by the team of astronomer Man-To Hui at the Macau University of Science and Technology in Taipa, Macau. Because Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein was too far away for Humble to detect precise measurements, Man-To Hui and his team copied a computer model and subtracted the brightness of the surrounding smoky coma core to give the aforementioned dimensions.

Currently, the comet is approaching from the edge of the solar system at 22,000 miles per hour, or 35,405,568 kilometers per hour. However, NASA said, “It will never come closer than a billion miles to the Sun, which is slightly more than the distance of planet Saturn. And that won’t happen until 2031.”

The comet has been traveling toward the sun for about a million years, and according to NASA, it will come from the Oort Cloud, which is the nesting site of many comets and remains a mystery to science, despite being the world’s largest object. The comets that make up the Solar System are too distant and faint to measure. Despite this, astronomers from Leiden University in the Netherlands have managed to reconstruct the first 100 million years of the Oort Cloud.

Comets that are part of the Oort Cloud did not form very far from the Solar System, but due to gravitational changes, some were ejected millions of years ago. According to NASA, a distant comet will only gravitate towards the Solar System when something is bothering them, such as “the gravitational force of a passing star.”

By recording this comet, the total mass of the Oort Cloud can be further clarified, which is estimated to be 20 times greater than the mass of the Earth, which is about 6,000 trillion tons.

The Oort Cloud was first observed by Dutch astronomer Jan Oort in 1950, and is described by NASA as a “shell” surrounding our Solar System, consisting of “billions of icy bodies orbiting the Sun” and are occasionally popped in while there. It is a phenomenon that disrupts the orbit of one of these objects.

With a deeper understanding of the Oort Cloud, it is possible to better understand the evolutionary process of the Solar System, as the comets of this nesting site are “frozen examples of the composition of the early solar system, preserved over billions of years.” According to NASA. Launched in 1977, the Voyager spacecraft will take about 300 years to reach the Cloud and about 30,000 years to pass through it.

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