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Bernardinelli - Bernstein comet

April 20 , 2022 952 days 859 0
  • Recently, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Hubble Space Telescope has confirmed that the huge Bernardinelli-Bernstein comet is indeed the largest icy comet nucleus ever seen by astronomers.
  • The nucleus is called the C/2014 UN271 which has an estimated diameter of almost 129 kilometers.
  • The nucleus is around 50 times larger than that of most known comets, and its mass is estimated to be around 500 trillion tonnes.
  • The comet was discovered by astronomers Pedro Bernardinelli and Gary Bernstein in archival images from the Dark Energy Survey at an astronomical observatory in Chile.
  • It was discovered in November 2010 and has been intensively studied since.

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