Hubble discovers the LARGEST comet yet and it's bigger than Rhode Island, see pics
NASA's Hubble Space Telescope has discovered a massive 'megacomet' that is more than 80 miles wide and has an astounding mass of 500 trillion tonnes. It's about 50 times larger than the average comet core and more than double the width of Rhode Island. In photographs, it appears to be a pinprick of light, but scientists have proven that this freshly found space snowball is the biggest comet ever spotted, stretching the length of more than three marathons.
"This comet is literally the tip of the iceberg for many thousands of comets that are too faint to see in the more distant parts of the solar system," David Jewitt, co-author of a new study confirming the comet's size and a professor of planetary science and astronomy at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), said in the NASA statement. "We've always suspected this comet had to be big because it is so bright at such a large distance. Now we confirm it is." According to researchers, the size of this comet is crucial since it gives information on the size range of comets circling in our solar system's outer edges. The Oort Cloud is a sphere of old, frozen objects that surrounds the system. According to NASA, the cloud is still a theory since the comets in it are too weak and distant to be spotted directly.
