"Hubble" took photographs of the brightest comets potentially decades - Reuters

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MOSCOW, April 24 – RIA Novosti. The space telescope “Hubble” for the first time held a “photo shoot” comet ISON – potentially the brightest comet decades, the processing of images showed that the comet nucleus has a size of about 5-6 kilometers, and the gas envelope extends 5,000 kilometers, which is 1.2 times wider than Australia, says NASA.

Comet C/2012 S1 (ISON) was opened on 21 September 2012 the Russian astronomer Artyom Novichonok and his counterpart from Belarus Vitaly Nevsky at the observatory in Kislovodsk, a member of the network ISON. Comet in November 2013 will be held at a distance of 0.012 astronomical units (average radius of Earth’s orbit) from the Sun. At this time, the brightness of the comet may reach full brightness of the moon, and it will probably be the brightest in the decade.

Like all comets, C/2012 S1 (ISON), is “a piece of dirty ice” – a mixture of water ice, frozen gases and dust particles. When approaching the Sun the ice begins to evaporate, the nucleus appears gas-dust jacket – a coma, and a tail that can extend over millions of kilometers, and the comet itself is much brighter.

shot of Comet ISON, made telescope “Hubble”

Now Comet ISON is not visible to the naked eye – it is located a little closer radius of the orbit of Jupiter. However, the images that are “Hubble” made on April 10, it is seen that even at this distance the comet is quite active – throws dust jets (jets), and its dust tail stretches for 92,000 kilometers. Preliminary estimates show that the size of the nucleus of Comet ISON is from 4.8 to 6.4 kilometers, which are relatively few – one of the most brilliant in the history of comet Hale-Bopp had a kernel size of 60 kilometers, and Halley’s Comet – 15 by 8 kilometers. At the same time, one of the very brightest comets – Comet Lovejoy, which in December 2011 to compare the brightness of Venus, had a core size of only 500 meters.

During the next week experts are going to continue to follow with “Hubble” to find out, in particular, the chemical composition of the comet.

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