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Recently, scientists discovered a comet with the largest nucleus in history. It flies non-stop towards the Sun and by 2031 will reach the orbit of Saturn. We figure out if it can crash into the Earth and what will happen in this case
Discovery of a huge comet
In mid-April 2022, NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope discovered the comet with the largest nucleus in history. It turned out to be C/2014 UN271 Bernardinelli-Bernstein. The diameter of its core is about 128 km, which is three times the size of Moscow within the Moscow Ring Road at its widest point. C / 2014 UN271 weighs 500 trillion tons, which is 100 thousand times more than ordinary solar system comets.
David Jewitt, professor at the University of California Institute of Astronomy and co-author of the study, said: “This comet is literally the tip of an iceberg of thousands of others that are simply too far away from us, so we can’t see them yet. We always suspected that Bernardinelli-Bernstein must be huge, because even at long distances she was very bright. Now we have confirmed this conjecture.
On the way to Saturn
C/2014 UN271 was accidentally discovered by astronomers Pedro Bernardinelli and Gary Bernstein in the 2000s while studying archival photographs for the Expanding Universe Project. By a lucky chance, in 2010 it was able to be fixed through a telescope. Since then, the comet has been thoroughly studied. In addition to discovering the size of its core, scientists have found that C / 2014 UN271 flies towards the Sun for about 1 million years. Now it is about 3,2 billion km from it. At the closest distance to the star (about 1,6 billion km), the comet will approach in 2031. Scientists say that there is nothing to worry about: it will not fly beyond the orbit of Saturn. However, it is quite possible to calculate the approximate effect that C/2014 UN271 would have on impact with the Earth.
Thousands of times more powerful than the dinosaur killer
Even a comet as large as C/2014 UN271 would not be able to completely destroy our planet. This will require 20 thousand times more energy. Therefore, the Earth will basically remain whole. However, the destruction will still be gigantic. In terms of scale, they will exceed the consequences of an asteroid impact about 66 million years ago, which led to the extinction of dinosaurs, by thousands of times. Then most amphibians could die within a few hours or days after the fall due to a sharp increase in temperature. This collision could cause irreversible climate change, increase the acid content in the atmosphere and change the composition of the oceans.
Destruction of the earth’s crust
If C/2014 UN271 Bernardinelli-Bernstein reaches the whole Earth, it will completely break and move the earth’s crust. According to some scientists, the same event happened to Mars: due to a collision with a celestial body, a hilly surface with an abundance of craters formed on the Red Planet. A huge amount of dust, ash and debris will fly into the atmosphere. It is possible that especially large ones will become additional satellites of the Earth, mini-moons with a diameter of several kilometers.
Darkness, tornadoes and death of all life
The Earth will be plunged into darkness for months as thick layers of dust block out sunlight. Because of this, large-scale disasters will begin, and most of the animals and plants will die in the first weeks. Even bottom-dwelling bacteria living in hydrothermal vents could be wiped out by an impact of this magnitude sending water from the seas and oceans into space. Thus, a collision with comet C/2014 UN271 leads to:
- months of darkness;
- destruction of the earth’s crust, oceans and atmosphere;
- ejection into space of most parts of the earth’s crust, oceans and atmosphere;
- ejection of volcanic magma to the surface;
- fiery tornadoes due to the abundance of debris that will continue for several years;
- destruction of all life on earth.