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Dubbed Bernardinelli-Bernstein, it is thousands of times more massive than an average comet. Its close approach is a rare chance to learn more about how Earth and its neighbors were born:
Seven years ago, a pair of scientists scouring high-resolution images of space caught fleeting glimpses of a bright round object peeking from a vast cloud of icy objects more than 2 billion miles from Earth.
As if that whole scene wasn’t exciting enough, the object appeared to be a huge comet. Thought to be between 60 and 100 miles wide, it was the biggest comet a human being had ever witnessed. And it seemed to be heading toward us, very loosely speaking.
[...] Because it’s so much bigger than other known comets—the famous Hale-Bopp comet, which itself is on the larger side, measures just 37 miles across—Bernardinelli-Bernstein possesses enough gravity to hold itself together as it lazily loops through space. It’s harder to break apart.
The comet’s extreme distance from the sun also helped preserve it. “It spends most of its time in the deep freeze of the outer solar system,” Mainzer explained. Models of the megacomet’s orbit indicate it last entered our part of the solar system around 5 million years ago and got no closer than Uranus. From that distance, the sun’s heat hardly touched it.
Mainzer says that as a result, the comet she affectionately calls “BB” probably resembles the original chemical state of the nebula of gas and dust that formed our solar system about 4.5 billion years ago.
[...] It’s highly unlikely NASA or some other space agency building a probe to intercept and collect samples from Bernardinelli-Bernstein (which is ironically what NASA is currently doing with the asteroids surrounding Jupiter).
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 13 2021, @02:25AM (2 children)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spherical_cow [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by FatPhil on Wednesday October 13 2021, @02:55AM (1 child)
Spherical cows are supposed to be simplified archetypes that give us an insight into a class of objects which approximate that archetype that would be hard to derive without the simplification.
This is the largest object of its kind we've found, and as yet we know very little about it apart from its trajectory, which is far from simple or typical, in now way can it currently be thought of as representative of its class, and something from which we can derive properties about other members of that class.
Journalist learnt a new phrase yesterday, but didn't learn enough about it to use it correctly.
That anyone vaguely technical wasn't aware of the phrase is a bit shocking. What's happened to education nowadays? And yes, this is a snark at the GPP as much as the journalist. He wasn't even able to parse a noun phrase correctly either, and thus be able to ask the right question.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 13 2021, @04:04PM
I grew up on a farm. The only cows I came across mooed.