Estimated to be 100–200 kilometers across, the unusual wandering body will make its closest approach to the Sun in 2031.

A giant comet from the outskirts of our Solar System has been discovered in 6 years of data from the Dark Energy Survey. Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein is estimated to be about 1000 times more massive than a typical comet, making it arguably the largest comet discovered in modern times. It has an extremely elongated orbit, journeying inward from the distant Oort Cloud over millions of years. It is the most distant comet to be discovered on its incoming path, giving us years to watch it evolve as it approaches the Sun, though it’s not predicted to become a naked-eye spectacle.

A giant comet has been discovered by two astronomers following a comprehensive search of data from the Dark Energy Survey (DES). The comet, which is estimated to be 100–200 kilometers across, or about 10 times the diameter of most comets, is an icy relic flung out of the Solar System by the migrating giant planets in the early history of the Solar System. This comet is quite unlike any other seen before and the huge size estimate is based on how much sunlight it reflects.

In the yawning vacuum of intergalactic space, something large is lurking.

Not a galaxy, although it’s of a comparable size: A vast cloud of hot, faintly glowing gas, bigger than the Milky Way, in the space between galaxies congregating in a huge cluster.

Scientists believe this cloud may have been unceremoniously stripped from a galaxy in the cluster, the first gas cloud of this kind we’ve ever seen. Even more surprisingly, it hasn’t dissipated, but has remained clumped together for hundreds of millions of years.

Our generation will certainly not be around by then, and it’s unclear what will happen to humanity as a species, but in about 4.5 billion years, our galaxy will not be anything like we know it, thanks to a mammoth galactic event that will see the Milky Way merging with nearby Andromeda.

Dipole shield could shield #Mars

The Martian atmosphere is a decimated shred of what it once was, thanks to the fact that a disappearing magnetic field allowed solar winds to pummel the red planet’s skies over millions of years. So naturally, one solution to making Mars more habitable may be to resurrect its magnetosphere — and it’s a crazy idea NASA scientists are actually looking into.

At Wednesday’s Planetary Science Vision 2050 Workshop at the NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C., NASA’s Planetary Science Division Director Jim Green spoke about how this magnetic shield would work.

“It may be feasible that we can get up to these higher field strengths that are necessary to provide that shielding,” Green said. “We need to be able then to also modify that direction of the magnetic field so that it always pushes the solar wind away.”