The comet, known as 2014 UN271, was first discovered by the Dark Energy Survey (DES) – an international collaborative project started in 2013 that is listed as working at Chile's Victor Blanco Telescope and was founded with the purpose of mapping galaxies, detecting supernovae and uncovering mysteries about dark energy.
The discovery was announced on June 19, using data from the NASA-funded Minor Planet Center's Minor Planet Electronic Circulars (MPECs).
Some qualified 2014 UN271 as the size of a small dwarf planet, though Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics astronomer Jonathan McDowell questioned that analysis. .
"Seems like maybe a tad too small to qualify as dwarf planet?" he wrote on Twitter.
"Based on the given absolute magnitude, and given how exceptionally red it looked in 2014 precovery images from CFHT (the g - r color was 0.9, and r - i was 0.5!) I would estimate at an albedo of 0.01-0.08 a diameter of 130-370 kilometers (nominally 160) which puts it on a similar scale, if not larger than, Sarabat's huge comet C/1729 P1, and almost undoubtedly the largest Oort Cloud object ever discovered- almost in dwarf planet territory!" Sam Deen, a citizen astronomer, said in a post on the Minor Planet Mailing List (MPML) forum
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