Posted on Apr 13, 2022 in Astronomy, Science
But our Pale Blue Dot will be safe. “While Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein (C/2014 UN271) is far too small to blast a Moon out of Earth, it is big enough that it would cause a global catastrophe if it hit Earth. It probably has about 1000x the mass of the impactor that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs. But Comet BB is definitely not going to hit Earth!,” astrophysicist Gary Bernstein wrote in an email to The Daily Galaxy.
This enormous comet — approximately 80 miles across, more than twice the width of Rhode Island — is heading our way at 22,000 miles per hour from the edge of the solar system. Fortunately, it will never get closer than one billion miles from the sun, which is slightly farther from Earth than Saturn; and that will be in 2031.
Solar System’s Largest Structure is All but Invisible
Comets, among the oldest objects in the solar system, are icy bodies that were unceremoniously tossed out of the solar system in a gravitational pinball game among the massive outer planets, said David Jewitt. The UCLA professor of planetary science and astronomy co-authored a new study of the comet in the Astrophysical Journal Letters. The evicted comets took up residence in the Oort cloud, a vast reservoir of far-flung comets encircling the solar system out to many billions of miles into deep space, he said.
“First hypothesized in 1950 by Dutch astronomer Jan Oort, the Oort cloud still remains a theory because the comets that make it up are too faint and distant to be directly observed. This means the solar system’s largest structure is all but invisible,” Jewitt noted.
Jupiter’s Spectacular Shoemaker-Levy 9 Impact –“Came from Previously Unknown Comet Gateway”
It’s Big and Blacker than Coal
A typical comet’s spectacular multi million-mile-long tail, which makes it look like a skyrocket, belies the fact that the source at the heart of the fireworks is a solid nucleus of ice mixed with dust — essentially a dirty snowball. This huge one, called Comet C/2014 UN271 and discovered by astronomers Pedro Bernardinelli and Gary Bernstein, could be as large as 85 miles across.
This image of comet C/2014 UN271 (Bernardinelli-Bernstein) shown below was taken by the Las Cumbres Observatory 1-m telescope at Sutherland, South Africa, on June 22, 2021; the diffuse cloud is the comet’s coma. Image credit: LOOK project, Las Cumbres Observatory.
“We’ve always suspected this comet had to be big because it is so bright at such a large distance. Now we confirm it is,” Jewitt explained. “It’s big and it’s blacker than coal,” he noted.
“When Pedro first showed me this new object that had been discovered by our software searching for distant planets, we both immediately knew that this was something incoming from very far away (the Oort cloud) and that it had to be very large compared to other known comets, and we had found it much earlier on its trip through the solar system than other comets are typically discovered,” Reese W. Flower Professor of Astronomy and Astrophysics Gary Bernstein at the University of Pennsylvania wrote in an email to The Daily Galaxy. “This of course was pretty exciting, and I guess my first thoughts were that we better go out and learn a lot more about comets if we wanted to understand the value of this new discovery!”
Largest Nucleus Ever Seen
This comet has the largest nucleus ever seen in a comet by astronomers. Jewitt and his colleagues determined the size of its nucleus using NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope. Its nucleus is about 50 times larger than those of most known comets. Its mass is estimated to be 500 trillion tons, a hundred thousand times greater than the mass of a typical comet found much closer to the sun.
“This is an amazing object, given how active it is when it’s still so far from the sun,” said lead author Man-To Hui, who earned his doctorate from UCLA in 2019 and is now with the Macau University of Science and Technology in Taipa, Macau. “We guessed the comet might be pretty big, but we needed the best data to confirm this.”
So the researchers used Hubble to take five photos of the comet on Jan. 8, 2022, and incorporated radio observations of the comet into their analysis.
The comet is now less than two billion miles from the sun and in a few million years will loop back to its nesting ground in the Oort cloud, Jewitt said.
Comet C/2014 UN271 was first serendipitously observed in 2010, when it was 3 billion miles from the sun. Since then, it has been intensively studied by ground and space-based telescopes.
Mysteries of The Oort Cloud
Comet Too Far Away to Visually Resolve Its Nucleus with Hubble
The challenge in measuring this comet was how to determine the solid nucleus from the huge dusty coma — the cloud of dust and gas — enveloping it. The comet is currently too far away for its nucleus to be visually resolved by Hubble. Instead, the Hubble data show a bright spike of light at the nucleus’ location. Hui and his colleagues next made a computer model of the surrounding coma and adjusted it to fit the Hubble images. Then, they subtracted the glow of the coma, leaving behind the nucleus.
Hui and his team compared the brightness of the nucleus to earlier radio observations from the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array, or ALMA, in Chile. The new Hubble measurements are close to the earlier size estimates from ALMA, but convincingly suggest a darker nucleus surface than previously thought.
The comet has been falling toward the sun for well over 1 million years. The Oort cloud is thought to be the nesting ground for trillions of comets. Jewitt thinks the Oort cloud extends from a few hundred times the distance between the sun and the Earth to at least a quarter of the way out to the distance of the nearest stars to our sun, in the Alpha Centauri system.
The Oort cloud’s comets were tossed out of the solar system billions of years ago by the gravitation of the massive outer planets, according to Jewitt. The far-flung comets travel back toward the sun and planets only if their orbits are disturbed by the gravitational tug of a passing star, the professor said.
“Tip of the Iceberg”
“The key thing is that UN271 is just the tip of the iceberg. It wouldn’t be visible if it were much smaller. So the detection of this big comet tells us that we will discover many smaller ones as we look more deeply into the outer solar system,” Jewitt told The Daily Galaxy.
The Last Word by Gary Bernstein
*When Comet BB comes closest to Earth in 2031, it’s still farther than Saturn, and will have an angular size of only 0.02 arcseconds, Gary Bernstein explained in his email to The Daily Galaxy. “That’s too small for the Hubble or James Webb space telescopes to resolve, unfortunately. By that time, though, I hope that there will be 20 or 30 meter telescopes on Earth that have adaptive optics and can resolve the nucleus. It’s also possible that mm-wave telescopes (like ALMA) could resolve the nucleus if it’s bright enough and can be distinguished from the coma and tail.”
Maxwell Moe, astrophysicist, NASA Einstein Fellow, University of Arizona via Gary Bernstein, David Jewitt and UCLA
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