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This Dark Energy Survey (DES) image is made up of some of the discovery exhibits showing Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein collected by the 570-megapixel Dark Energy Camera (DECam) mounted on the 4-meter Víctor M. Blanco telescope at Cerro Tololo American Inter-Observatory (CTIO) in Chile. These images show the comet in October 2017, when it was 25 AU, 83% of the distance from Neptune. Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein is estimated to be around 1,000 times more massive than a typical comet, making it arguably the largest comet discovered in modern times. It has an extremely elongated orbit, traveling inward from the distant Oort Cloud over millions of years. It is the furthest comet to discover on its inbound path. DECam was designed specifically for DES and operated by DOE and NSF between 2013 and 2019. DECam was funded by DOE and was built and tested at DOE’s Fermilab. DES was commissioned to map 300 million galaxies in a 5,000 square degree area of the night sky, but during his six years of observations he also observed numerous comets and transneptunian objects passing through the field under study. DES data analysis is supported by the Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Science Foundation (NSF), and the DECam scientific archives are held by the Community Science and Data Center (CSDC) of NSF’s NOIRLab. The CTIO and the CSDC are Programs of the NOIRLab.
(WSYR-TV) – Astronomers recently discovered what may be the biggest comet in history.
The comet is known as the Bernardinelli-Bernstein comet, after its discoverers, Pedro Bernardinelli and Gary Bernstein of the University of Pennsylvania.
Its diameter is estimated to be 62 to 124 miles wide, which scientists say is about 10 times the diameter of most comets! For comparison, the distance between Syracuse, NY and Binghamton, NY is 73 miles. The distance between Syracuse, NY and Scranton, PA is 130 miles.
The comet’s journey began 3.7 trillion kilometers from the sun. In the summer of 2021, the comet was about 1.8 billion kilometers from the sun. The comet originated in the Oort Cloud and is the first comet, heading towards the sun, to be detected so far away.
It will take another 10 years to reach its closest point to the bright star. The distance will be a little more than the distance from Saturn to the sun.
Bernardinelli says that the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which houses the world’s largest digital camera ever designed for optical astronomy, “will continuously measure comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein until its perihelion in 2031, and will likely find some. many, many others like her “. .
It is not known how active and bright it will be in 2031, but it is predicted that sky watchers will need a large telescope to see it for themselves.
