Nasa scientists have announced a shocking find – a comet heading towards Earth
The world was put on pause because of coronavirus and we’re seeing natural disaster after disaster being recorded, so it feels like we’re just continuing to fend off one threat after another.
But there’s another coming our way and this time it’s a comet – the largest one we’ve ever seen.
The nucleus of the comet is 50 times bigger than normal.
Now it initially raised alarms as it was seen flying into Earth at nearly 36,000 kilometres per hour.
But it’s not actually likely that it’ll crash into us, the closest it will get is about 8 billion kilometres away from the Sun and that won’t be until 2031.
Nasa’s Hubble telescope spotted the comet, measuring its nucleus have a mass of around 500 trillion tonnes and 137 kilometres wide, larger than the country of Luxembourg.
Now we’ve known about this comet for quite some time now it was first seen in 2010 but the Hubble only confirmed its existence just now.
Astronomy experts say the size of the comet didn’t come as as surprise as it was already very bright at such a large distance.
In terms of where these comets even come from Nasa describes them as ice lego blocks that were left over when planets were first constructed.
These comets were then thrown out of the Solar System due to a gravitational pull from other outer planets.
They all gathered in what is called the Oort Cloud a group of comets that circle our universe.
The comet is now less than 3 billion kilometres from the Sun.
