Thursday, April 14, 2022

the Comet Song

Yeah yeah yeah - the Jim Webb telescope is almost up and running, but clearly, do not count the Hubble out yet. 

The Hubble confirmed the largest icy comet nucleus ever seen by scientists.

The nucleus of comet C/2014 UN271 (Bernardinelli-Bernstein - and really, isn't saying C/2014 UN271 just as easy and spouting off Bernardinelli-Bernstein)?) is about 80 miles in diameter, which is larger than the state of Rhode Island. The mass of the nucleus is 500 trillion tons. That alone sounds like an SAT math problem, one I'm not willing to try to solve, but safe to say my TI-35 doesn't have that many digits anyhow and I'm not calculating it long-hand 

The comet - as it shall be referred in the rest of this post - was discovered in 2010 (though with its name, you'd think it was 2014) 3 billion (with a b) miles from the sun. It's gonna come 1 billion miles from us at it's closest in 2031 -- but I think we'll survive that near impact. 

Actually, the Webb and the Hubble will be looking at different things throughout space, so while everyone is quick to compare them, all things are equal. 

I love we are discovering this shit. And by "we", I mean "they".  I like when science disputes the universe has been around longer than 6,000 years. 



Song by: Björk

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