VERY INTERESTING: LARGEST COMETS EVER

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One of the largest comets ever seen is headed our way

Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein offers a rare opportunity for a generation of astronomers to study an object from the extreme edges of the solar system.

More than 2.7 billion miles from the sun—29 times farther than Earth treads—a tiny sliver of sunlight reflected off something plummeting toward our home star. Something icy. Something unimaginably old. Something big.

About four hours later, in the predawn hours of October 20, 2014, a telescope in Chile’s Atacama Desert turned its gaze toward the heavens and snapped an enormous picture of the southern night sky, capturing hints of this reflected light.

However, it would take nearly seven years for researchers to identify that strange dot of light as a huge primordial comet—possibly the biggest ever studied with modern telescopes. Called Bernardinelli-Bernstein, the comet was announced in June, and researchers have now compiled everything they know about it in a discovery paper submitted to The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

“My phone didn’t stop ringing—I wasn’t expecting the reception the [scientific] community gave to the discovery,” says Pedro Bernardinelli, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington. He co-discovered the comet during the final weeks of his Ph.D. research at the University of Pennsylvania with his then-adviser Gary Bernstein. “Overall, it’s been pretty overwhelming.”

A large comet, named Bernardinelli-Bernstein, was discovered earlier this year. It will take ten years to reach its closest approach to the sun, affording astronomers plenty of time to study this cosmic giant.

The latest estimates put the comet’s nucleus at about 93 miles (150 kilometers) wide. That’s by far the biggest size estimate for a comet in decades. By contrast, comet 67P/Churyumov–Gerasimenko, which the European Space Agency’s Rosetta spacecraft orbited from 2014 to 2016, was only about 2.5 miles wide.

“We’re going from your city-size comets to your island-size comets,” says Michele Bannister, an astronomer at New Zealand’s University of Canterbury who was not involved in the discovery paper. Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein’s size may even rank alongside some historical “great comets,” including a very bright—and presumably huge—comet that journeyed into the inner solar system in 1729.

Over the next decade, Bernardinelli-Bernstein will continue to get brighter as it approaches the inner solar system, dive-bombing the plane of the planets’ orbits from below. It will make its closest approach on January 21, 2031, when the comet is expected to come within about a billion miles of the sun, slightly farther away than Saturn’s average distance. It will then begin its long retreat back into the solar system’s outer realms, remaining visible into at least the 2040s, if not decades longer.

Depending on how much gas the comet releases as its ices vaporize in the sun’s glare, Bernardinelli-Bernstein could get as bright in the night sky as Saturn’s largest moon Titan. If so, the comet should be visible in 2031 with a decent backyard telescope.

But Bernardinelli-Bernstein is also notable for how far it was from the sun when it was first spotted. The icy object hails from the Oort cloud, an enormous spherical haze of objects that surrounds the sun thousands of times farther out than Earth.

Astronomers calculate that this comet takes millions of years to circle the sun. Only three such “long-period” comets have ever been discovered on their way in from the Oort cloud, and Bernardinelli-Bernstein was found when it was still more than 2.7 billion miles away, a record for a comet. Because it was discovered so early, a generation of astronomers will have the opportunity to unravel its mysteries.

And as always have a chilled day from the Viking