Astronomers have confirmed the size of the largest comet in the universe

Astronomers using the Hubble telescope have confirmed the existence of the largest comet ever discovered. It will fly by the Sun in the next decade.

Comet C/2014 UN271, also known as the Bernardinelli-Bernstein comet and named after the discoverers, is about 130 km wide – for comparison, this is the distance from Kyiv to Zhytomyr.

Its core is estimated to weigh 500 trillion tons, about 100,000 times more than most comets.

In addition, the comet is moving at 35,000 miles per hour and is approaching the Earth, but humanity has nothing to worry about when it makes its closest approach in 2031, because the comet will be almost 2 billion km from the Sun, which is not much more than the distance between Earth and Saturn.

“This comet is literally the tip of the iceberg among the many thousands of comets that are too faint to be seen in the more distant parts of the solar system.

We have always suspected that this comet must be large because it is so bright at such a great distance. We now confirm that this is the case,” said David Jewitt, professor of planetary science and astronomy at the University of California at Los Angeles.

The comet was discovered by Pedro Bernardinelli and Gary Bernstein on archival images in 2014, when it was more than 3 billion km from the Sun, which already then spoke of its gigantic size.