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Last year, scientists announced they had discovered something. giant comet only remaining inside Neptune’s orbit. They estimated that its icy core is between 62 and 125 miles long, depending on its brightness. If the predictions were correct, this would be the largest comet ever discovered.

But scientists wanted to make sure the supremacy stuck, so in January they pointed the Hubble Space Telescope at the comet and measured its core with precision. As reported this week Astrophysical Journal LettersThe comet’s core can be up to 85 miles wide, making it more than twice the width. state of rhode island. It also has a mass of roughly 500 trillion tons. 2,800 Mount Everest.

“It’s 100 times larger than the typical comets we’ve been studying for all these years,” he said. David JewittHe is an astronomer and planetary scientist at the University of California, Los Angeles, and the author of the new study.

Despite its impressive size, this comet, named C/2014 UN271 (Bernardinelli-Bernstein) after its two discoverers, will only be briefly visible to the naked eye. It’s moving toward the sun at 22,000 miles per hour. But at its closest approach, in 2031, it will come just a billion miles from the sun – just behind Saturn’s orbit – and appear as a faint glow in the night sky before returning to the shadows.

However, with Hubble’s help, astronomers can view and examine this bubbling extraterrestrial visitor in all its glory, almost as if it were flying right next to it—a ghostly blue haze that enveloped a seemingly bright, white heart. “The image they have is beautiful,” said the comet discoverer. Pedro BernardinelliAn astrophysicist at the University of Washington who was not involved in the work.

Despite its weight, measuring the size of this comet’s core proved difficult. Despite being far from the sun, just a drop of sunlight is enough to evaporate the core’s volatile carbon monoxide ices, creating a confusing dusty atmosphere known as coma.

Hubble could not see the comet core clearly from this fog. But by taking such high-resolution images of the comet with the space telescope, Dr. Jewitt and his colleagues were able to create a computer model of the coma, which allowed them to digitally extract them from the images. With just the core left, sizing it up was a breeze.

Their analysis also revealed that its icy core was blacker than coal. Dr. Jewitt said this may be due in part to being “baked by cosmic rays.” High energy cosmic rays it bombards the core, breaking the chemical bonds on its surface. This allowed some of the lighter elements, such as hydrogen, to escape into space, leaving behind dark carbon, making the core a bit like a seriously burned slice of toast.

This dark core indicates that this comet – despite its super-size – is not much different from the others. “Comet nuclei are almost always super dark,” he said. toy karateD., a planetary scientist at Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona, who was not involved in the research. He suggests comparing comets to roadside snowdrifts. “Although it’s still mostly ice, just adding some dirt and grime can make a snowdrift look dingy and dark.”

The closer you get to Saturn’s orbit, the more secrets the comet will reveal. But in 2031, as we begin the return leg of the three-million-year solar cycle, astronomers will likely know no more about its origin, as with the Oort cloud – a hypothetical and currently unobservable bubble around the solar system. Primitive ice chunks of various shapes and sizes.

C/2014 UN271 is a nice preview of what’s hiding inside this bubble. However, Dr. “Finding this thing is a reminder of how little we know about the outer solar system,” Jewitt said. “There are lots of objects out there that we haven’t seen, and lots of things we haven’t even imagined.”

“Who knows what’s going on there,” he added.