Incredible Comet Bigger than the Sun

BREAKING EARTH NEWS
COMET 17P/HOLMES
Image: Comet Holmes is shown in this photo taken through a telescope from Palm Beach Gardens, Florida November 4, 2007. The comet experienced an outburst and brightened a million times and can now be seen with the naked eye, according to NASA. REUTERS/Doug Murray (UNITED STATES)

A comet that has delighted backyard astronomers in recent weeks after an unexpected eruption has now grown larger than the sun.
Comet Holmes has released so much gas and dust that its extended atmosphere, or coma, is larger than the diameter of the sun. The comparison is clear in a new image.

"It continues to expand and is now the largest single object in the solar system," according to astronomers at the University of Hawaii.

The coma's diameter on Nov. 9 was 869,900 miles (1.4 million kilometers), based on measurements by Rachel Stevenson, Jan Kleyna and Pedro Lacerda of the University of Hawaii Institute for Astronomy. They used observations from the Canada-France-Hawaii Telescope. The sun's diameter, stated differently by various sources and usually rounded to the nearest 100, is about 864,900 miles (1.392 million kilometers).

Separately, a new Hubble Space Telescope photo of the comet reveals an intriguing bow-tie structure around its nucleus.

Holmes is still visible to the naked eye as a fuzzy star anytime after dark, high in the northeast sky. You can find it by using this sky map. It is faintly visible from cities, and from dark country locations is truly remarkable.

SEE COMETS THROUGH TIME: MYTH AND MYSTERY (UNIVERSAL SKY TOUR)

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