A week after astronomers noticed a new object in the sky, they identified it as a comet. Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein takes 5.5 million years to complete its orbit.
This alien object was just identified as a comet, just a week after astronomers first observed it as a small, moving dot in archival dark energy camera footage from the inter-American observatory Cerro Tololo in Chile.
This comet is known as Comet C / 2014 UN271, or Bernardinelli-Bernstein after its discoverers, University of Pennsylvania graduate student Pedro Bernardinelli and astronomer Gary Bernstein.
This comet has an impressive width, about 10 km, or 20 times the distance from Earth to the Sun. It will reach its closest point to the Sun in its orbit on January 23, 2031, when it will be just outside of Saturn’s orbit, roughly 10.95 times the distance between Earth and the Sun.
“In fact, we’ll have 20 years to study it,” said Peter Vereš, an astronomer at the Harvard & Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the Minor Planet Center, which determines and calculates the orbits of new comets, minor planets and others. distant rocky bodies.
This is an exciting opportunity as the comet could be an almost pristine object of the Oort Cloud, a field of icy rocky debris that likely surrounds the solar system like a brittle shell.
