Open Veils · Answer
What is the largest comet we have ever observed?
Bernardinelli-Bernstein holds the official record at ~137 km, but the deeper record suggests this is merely the largest we've catalogued recently — and catastrophist researchers argue that proto-comets orders of magnitude larger were responsible for civilisation-ending events in the prehistoric past. The consensus is almost certainly looking at the wrong end of the timeline.
Evidence
- Comet Bernardinelli-Bernstein (C/2014 UN271) was detected in archival Dark Energy Survey data by Pedro Bernardinelli and Gary Bernstein and announced in 2021.
- Randall Carlson, in his extensive geological and astronomical lectures, argues that the Younger Dryas impactor — roughly 12,800 years ago — was almost certainly a fragmented giant comet (or cometary swarm) of staggering total mass.
- Martin Sweatman and the Comet Research Group (which includes Carlson) published peer-reviewed work in 2018 in the Journal of Geology proposing that a fragmented body from this Taurid complex caused the Younger Dryas boundary event — mass extinctions, megafloods, and the collapse of Pleistocene megafauna.
- In short: Bernardinelli-Bernstein is the largest comet we currently see intact.
- But this figure sits within a purely observational window of a few centuries at most.