NASA finds the largest comet ever

Data from the Hubble Space Telescope have confirmed that C/2014 UN271 is the largest comet ever detected.  

The comet, also known as Bernardinelli-Bernstein, has a nucleus 50 times larger than the average, about 130 kilometres long, and a mass of 500 trillion tonnes, 100,000 times greater than the average comet near the Sun. ACCORDING TO NASA Communication from the behemoth comet is hurtling towards the Sun at a speed of 35 200 kilometres, but there is no need to worry, as researchers estimate that it will never get closer than 1.6 billion kilometres from the giant star.

The largest comet detected so far was C/2002 VQ94, with a nucleus estimated by researchers to be 96 kilometres long. The previous peak was found in 2002 during the Lincoln Near-Earth Asteroid Research (LINEAR) project.

The new record holder was discovered by astronomers Pedro Bernardinelli and Gary Bernstein at an observatory in Chile, and was first detected in 2010. At that time it was 4.8 billion kilometres from the Sun, but now it may be around 3.2 billion kilometres away. Researchers were intrigued not only by the comet's size, but also by its unusually dark, "blacker than coal " was also a surprise.

The Hubble Space Telescope was launched more than 30 years ago, on 24 April 1990, with the aim of becoming the astronomer's first observation instrument. It is named after twentieth-century astronomer Edwin Hubble, who discovered that the galaxies are not part of the Milky Way, and was the first to argue that redshift is proportional to the distance of the galaxy.