A Gargantuan Space Rock:137 km Wide Mega Comet Hurtling Through Our Solar System @TheCosmosNews

#thecosmosnews An 85-Mile-Wide Comet Is Officially The Largest Comet Ever Observed The Bernardinelli-Bernstein comet, identified in 2021, is officially the biggest comet ever observed. The new record, reported on the preprint website arXiv 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 (74 kilometers) across. Bernardinelli-Bernstein, also known as comet 2014 UN271, has now been calculated to be about 85 miles (137 km) across. The Bernardinelli-Bernstein comet is named after its discoverers, University of Pennsylvania cosmologist Gary Bernstein and University of Washington postdoctoral scholar Pedro Bernardinelli, who first spotted the comet in 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 solar system. Its orbit takes it as far as a light-year from the sun – and takes 5.5 million years to complete. Bernardinelli Bernstein Biggest Comet ever found The mega comet hurtling through our solar system is 85 miles wide Earth Orbit nasa C/2014 UN271 gigantic discovered oort cloud asteroid planet x