NASA’s TESS Captures Giant Active Comet Moving Farther Away From the Sun

New research recently showed that a giant comet known as Comet Bernadinelli-Bernstein or Comet BB turned active much farther from the sun than expected.

A Space.com report specified that according to the dynamic planet-hunting telescope of NASA, one of the largest comets ever detected was active long before researchers had expected.

Essentially, comets are composed of dust and ice leftover from the solar system's early days. When a comet passes close to the sun, its ice starts to vaporize and form an envelope identified as "coma," making it an active comet.

Nevertheless, the distance from the sun at which a comet is becoming active generally depends on what kind of ice it comprises, like carbon dioxide, water, or carbon monoxide, for instance.

Comet BB

So far out, as stated in this report, temperatures are extremely cold for water ice to become vapor. Consequently, the results can help identify what exactly the comet is made of and offer a new understanding of the conditions of the early solar system, as indicated in a statement from the University of Maryland.

Early approximations have suggested that Comet BB could reach a diameter of up to 100 kilometers, among the largest comets identified to date. About this, scientists first detected the object when it was outside the planet Uranus.

Most comets are below one kilometer and are detected much nearer the sun. Researchers have only discovered one other active comet so far from the sun, and it was much smaller than the Comet BB, the statement indicated.

According to the study's lead author Tony Farnham, who's also an astronomer at the University of Maryland, such observations "are pushing the distances for active comets" drastically farther than what has been previously known.

The Brightest Nucleus of Comet BB Found

Utilizing data from the Dark Energy Survey, an international initiative to examine the sky over the Southern Hemisphere, astronomers initially found the brightest nucleus of Comet BB earlier this year, in June.

Nevertheless, at that time, such observations did not have an adequately high resolution to show the comet's coma.

Instead, the new research published in The Planetary Science Journal used images which NASA's Transient Exoplanet Satellite (TESS) took.

Essentially, TESS was launched in 2018, spending most of its time searching for planets orbiting nearby stars.

However, to perform the work, the telescope captures long exposures, then, in turn, the sky's a more detailed view, the statement specified, and that cannot be utilized for various objects.

TESS Images Combined

The study authors combined thousands of images captured by TESS taken between 2018 and 2020 to get a clearer view of the comet, not to mention the hazy glow of dust surrounding it.

By layering images so that the comet was aligned in every frame, the study investigators revealed its coma, proving it was active during that time.

Researchers had had previously detected activity on the comet in the images captured when it was 20 times the distance of the earth from the sun.

Notably, scientists are calling the earth's average distance from the sun an "astronomical unit" or AU. Such a measurement denotes roughly 93 million miles or 150 million kilometers.

The observations of TESS show that Comet BB was active as much as 23 AU from the sun, even though the researchers suspect that the same observations taken a few years earlier could have spotted a comma if only TESS had been functioning at the time.

Related information about the biggest comet is shown on Bright Side's YouTube video below:

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