A comet with a nucleus 50 times bigger than normal is barrelling towards Earth at 22,000 miles per hour.
- Nasa, which describes the icy dirtball as a behemoth “barrelling this way”, has named it Bernardinelli-Bernstein after its discovery by astronomers Pedro Bernardinelli and Gary Bernstein.
- Nasa’s Hubble telescope has determined the comet’s icy nucleus has a mass of about 500 trillion tonnes and is 85 miles (137km) wide.
- But, the closest it will get is one billion miles away from the Sun, and that won’t be until 2031.
- It was first spotted in 2010 but only now has Hubble confirmed its existence.
- Scientists first sighted it while working at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile over a decade ago when it was three billion miles from the Sun.
- Comets are described by Nasa as icy “Lego blocks,” left over from the early days of planet construction.
