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Some say it could be a remnant of the Great Comet of 1843.
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March 24, 2020: No one knows how big the icy core of Comet ATLAS (C/2019 Y4) might be–possibly no wider than a few kilometers. One thing’s for sure, though, the comet’s atmosphere is huge. New images from amateur astronomers around the world show that ATLAS’s gaseous envelope has ballooned in diameter to ~720,000 km–about half as wide as the sun.
“Comet ATLAS’s coma (atmosphere) is approximately 15 arcminutes in diameter,” reports Michael Jäger of Weißenkirchen, Austria, who took the picture, above, on March 18th. “Its newly-formed tail is about the same size.”
Other astronomers are getting similar results. 15 arcminutes = a quarter of a degree. Given Comet ATLAS’s distance of 1.1 AU on March 18th, that angle corresponds to a physical size of 720,000 km.
On the scale of big things in the solar system, Comet ATLAS falls somewhere between the sun (1,392,000 km diameter) and Jupiter…
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Tallbloke's Talkshop 
It’s expected to be extremely bright by late May, unless it disintegrates instead.
Charles Piazzi Smyth: The Great Comet of 1843
There was a comet with a coma larger than the sun a few years ago.
How the standard model explains how a tiny bodies gravity can hold a coma this size together I don’t know.
This would seem to falsify frame dragging too?
Damian: That comet was probably Eson – see my ‘disintegrates’ link in the first comment.
Or possibly Holmes in 2007…
The Splintering of Comet 17P/Holmes During a Mega-Outburst
http://www2.ess.ucla.edu/~jewitt/holmes.html
Thank Oldbrew you’re right, it was Holmes in 2007. I remember being extremely dubious that a coma could grow to that extent.
From the Holmes link:
Rachel Stevenson, Jan Kleyna and David Jewitt began observing comet Holmes in October 2007 soon after it was reported that the small (3.6 km wide) body had brightened by a million times in less than a day. They continued observing for several weeks after the outburst using the Canada- France-Hawaii Telescope in Hawaii and watched as the dust cloud ejected by the comet grew to be larger than the Sun.
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‘brightened by a million times in less than a day’ – how does that work?
‘the dust cloud ejected by the comet grew to be larger than the Sun’ – what?!
“‘the dust cloud ejected by the comet grew to be larger than the Sun’ – what?!“
I know! How could a tiny asteroidal body, moving quickly through the Solar System, hold a coma that size through gravity alone?
Smashes a few paradigms as far as I am concerned.
I would say it is a vindication of the Electric Universe’s cometary model but Holmes isn’t even a long period comet, it is within Jupiter’s orbit.
I suggest that much of “space” research (eg “blackholes”, “dark energy”, “big bang”, formation of universe etc) are a waste of money and time just like most of “climate science”. No one knows if how big is the universe or if it is infinite. No one knows the different paths of evolution and decline. We will not be any wiser by pretending to know something which is evolving 1000 light years away.
More from the Holmes link:
The astronomers examined a sequence of images taken over nine nights in November 2007 using a digital filter that enhances sharp discontinuities within images. The filter, called a Laplacian filter, is particularly good at picking out faint small-scale features that would otherwise remain undetected against the bright background of the expanding comet. They found numerous small objects that moved radially away from the nucleus at speeds up to 125 m/s (280 mph). These objects were too bright to simply be bare rocks, but instead were more like mini-comets creating their own dust clouds as the ice sublimated from their surfaces. [bold added]
What energy source causes such propulsion and brightness? One paper proposes a carbon monoxide ice ‘explosion’…
Research highlights
► We simulated sublimation of CO ice within nucleus of Comet Holmes. ► The tensile strength of the nucleus of Comet Holmes can be as low as 10 kPa. ► When the nucleus is very fine-grained the CO pressure can exceed 10 kPa. ► Sublimation of CO ice within nucleus of Comet Holmes may cause explosion.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S001910351100008X
It’s coming round again early next year: ‘Next perihelion February 19, 2021’ – Wikipedia
Nice. As long as he doesn’t try to take the Earth on his shoulders …
By definition, an expanding dust cloud is NOT being gravitationally bound. It is expanding.
Brightening happens as the ice AREA expands with the ice dust. More area reflects more sunlight. The rate of increase tells you the rate of cloud expansion, and that specific increase says the thing exploded.