Largest Comet Ever Sighted - 85 Miles Wide - Headed Our Way

goldenmick · 13-04-2022 9:51pm #1

The comet's icy nucleus has a mass of about 500 trillion tonnes and is 85 miles (137km) wide.

Not on a direct collision course with us but still frightening that comets this size could appear out of nowhere, and one day one of them will be coming straight at us.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-61097826

Cookiemunster · 15-04-2022 7:58am

How does spotted 12 years ago and passing by in another 9 account to 'appearing out of nowhere'?

Akrasia · 15-04-2022 8:01am

The joys of clickbait headlines

Esel · 15-04-2022 6:14pm

Can we somehow work a "comet time theory" into this thread, I wonder?

NIMAN · 16-04-2022 4:48am

Bruce Willis and the team will save us.

16-04-2022 4:57am

We're doomed, DOOMED, I tell you!

Bruce Willis has retired...

liamtech · 29-04-2022 8:38am

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118929704#Comment_118929704

in other news - OUT OF NO WHERE, did you know Pluto - HAS A MOON! It may have MORE THAN ONE!!!!!!! Shocking breaking story, apparently there are even PHOTOGRAPHS

MonkieSocks · 26-09-2022 6:33pm

TODAY NASA will make history but conducting the first ever Double Asteroid Redirection Test!

4 hours and 40 mins from the time of this post until contact

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXI1BezTj0U

cj maxx · 27-09-2022 9:07am

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119668203#Comment_119668203

Did it change the comet’s trajectory? Or do they know yet ?

MonkieSocks · 27-09-2022 4:25pm

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119669986#Comment_119669986

It will take a while fro all the data to be processed.

We might need it in the future, big enough Asteroid heading our way in the not too distant future, maybe,

https://www.asteroidmission.org/objectives/

Brussels Sprout · 27-09-2022 4:36pm

This is a complete aside but just reading the original article and it says that that comet came from the Oort cloud. I watched a lot of videos about the Oort cloud last year and it's really mind-boggling how large it is. One thing I was wondering though is since it's so vast and surrounds the solar system, in all directions, why doesn't it block out all external (inter stellar) light from entering the solar system? Is it not dense enough or what?

josip · 09-01-2023 11:00pm

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119672267#Comment_119672267

Is it really so massive? From reading wiki, it could have a mass of only up to 5,000 earths. Which at distances of up to 200,000 AU from the sun would mean it's very, very low density.

xper · 19-01-2023 12:24am

There is a common misconception based on the language used to name them and in particular their portrayal in science fiction movies/tv that the asteroid belt, Oort Cloud or other conceptually similar regions are densely crowded areas with madly spinning rocks bumping into each other all the time. But like the rest of space, they are almost entirely, well, empty space. Like really empty, with hundreds of thousands to millions of km between objects, at least.

Stand on any given asteroid in the main belt and you are very, very unlikely to see another asteroid with the naked eye (binary pairs orbiting each other excepted and perhaps in the very local vicinity of Ceres).

Take a bucket of sand. Think of how many sand grains are contained within it. Now scatter that one bucket of sand more or less evenly all over planet Earth. That's somewhat analogous to the density of the Oort Cloud. It wouldn't make a blind bit of difference to your view of the earth from the moon, say.

fattaximan · 19-01-2023 12:43am

Was it 2018 that a perfect cylindrical object the size of manhattan island flashed past at 3m mph ?

Brief_Lives · 09-02-2024 1:26pm

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/119672267#Comment_119672267

definitely not dense enough.... huge distances between objects.

below is a fun YouTube about the possibility of a 9th planet out past the Oort cloud, that is affecting Pluto sized objects, but might have an orbit around the sun of 1000s of years, the distances are so mind blowing when you consider that.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFJBUowcFTg