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posted by martyb on Tuesday October 12 2021, @01:30PM   Printer-friendly

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).


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  • (Score: 2) by cmdrklarg on Wednesday October 13 2021, @04:32PM (2 children)

    by cmdrklarg (5048) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday October 13 2021, @04:32PM (#1186693)

    Obviously, the aliens in Star Trek are humanoid because they had to be played by humans on TOS. They do actually have an episode of TNG that gives a canon reason why.

    https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/The_Chase_(episode) [fandom.com]

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  • (Score: 2) by mcgrew on Thursday October 14 2021, @06:01PM (1 child)

    by mcgrew (701) <publish@mcgrewbooks.com> on Thursday October 14 2021, @06:01PM (#1187048) Homepage Journal

    Yes, but thy could have made the aliens a LOT more alien looking. I'm thinking of the Horta in TOS. And that episode of TNG you refer to was nonsense; a squid and a human both evolved on the same planet, and share a lot of the same DNA. I don't even know anyone who speaks Dolphin, let alone Squid. But like faster than light travel, you have to ignore the reality.

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    • (Score: 2) by cmdrklarg on Thursday October 14 2021, @08:38PM

      by cmdrklarg (5048) Subscriber Badge on Thursday October 14 2021, @08:38PM (#1187101)

      I get what you're saying, but at the end of the day it boiled down to not having enough budget to do all those special effects. Same reason they have transporters: budget didn't allow for shuttle special effects.

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