Activity discovered on the biggest comet ever found

Thanks to the fast-response telescopes at Las Cumbres Observatory, a newly discovered visitor to the outer edges of our solar system has turned out to be the largest known comet of all time. The object, which is named comet C / 2014 UN271 Bernardinelli-Bernstein after its two discoverers, was first reported on Saturday, June 19, 2021. C / 2014 UN271 was found retreating for four years of data from the Dark Energy Survey, which was carried out using the 4m Blanco telescope at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile between 2013 and 2019. At the time of the announcement, there was no indication that it was acted from an active world. Anticipation was immediately high among astronomers. C / 2014 UN271 was from the cold far reaches of the solar system, so quick imagery was needed to find out: when would the newly discovered large world start showing the tail of a comet?

The Las Cumbres Observatory was quickly able to determine whether the object had become an active comet in the three years since it was first observed by the Dark Energy Survey. “As the new object was far to the south and quite faint, we knew there wouldn’t be many other telescopes that could observe it,” says Dr. Tim Lister, scientist at Las Cumbres Observatory. (LCO). “Fortunately, LCO has a network of robotic telescopes around the world, especially in the southern hemisphere, and we were able to quickly get images from LCO telescopes in South Africa,” said Tim Lister.

Images from one of LCO’s 1-meter telescopes housed at the South African Astronomical Observatory, arrived around 9 p.m. PDT on Monday evening, June 22. New Zealand astronomers who are members of the LCO Outbursting Objects Key (LOOK) project were the first to notice the new comet.

“As we’re a team based around the world, it just happened to be my afternoon, while the others were asleep. The first frame had the comet obscured by satellite footage and my heart sank. then the others were pretty clear and so it was: it was really a nice little fuzzy dot, not at all sharp like its neighboring stars, ”said Dr Michele Bannister of the University of Canterbury in New Zealand. Analysis of the OLS images showed a blurry coma around the object, indicating that it was active and that it was indeed a comet, even though it is still at a remarkable distance of over 1,800,000 000 miles, more than double the distance from Saturn to the sun.

The comet is estimated to be over 100 km in diameter, which is more than three times the size of the next largest comet nucleus that we know of, Comet Hale-Bopp, which was discovered in 1995. This comet is not expected to be become bright to the naked eye. : it will remain a telescopic object because its closest distance from the sun will always be beyond Saturn. Since comet C / 2014 UN271 was discovered so far away, astronomers will have more than a decade to study it. It will reach its closest approach to the sun in January 2031. A recent article in the New York Times about the comet details its planned trip.

Thus Tim Lister and the other astronomers of the LOOK project will have plenty of time to use the telescopes of the Las Cumbres observatory to study C / 2014 UN271. The LOOK project continues to observe the behavior of a large number of comets and the evolution of their activity as they approach the sun. Scientists are also using LCO’s rapid response capability to get observations very quickly when a comet explodes.

“There are now a large number of surveys, such as the Zwicky Transitional Facility and the future Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which monitor parts of the sky every night. These surveys can provide alerts if any of the comets change. suddenly out of brightness, then we can trigger LCO’s robotic telescopes to get more detailed data and a longer view of the changing comet as the survey moves to other areas of the sky, “says Tim Lister.” The telescopes LCO’s robotics and sophisticated software allow us to get images of a new event within 15 minutes of an alert, allowing us to actually study these explosions as they unfold.