About 6.44 billion kilometers from the sun floats Ultima Thule, an icy celestial body that NASA scientists on Wednesday announced is aptly shaped like a giant snowman.
The first detailed images beamed back from the US agency’s New Horizons mission allowed scientists to confidently determine the body was formed when two spheres, or “lobes,” slowly gravitated toward each other until they stuck together — a major scientific discovery.
The New Horizons spacecraft on Tuesday flew past Ultima Thule, which was discovered via telescope in 2014, and is the farthest and potentially oldest cosmic body ever observed by a spacecraft.
Photo: EPA-EFE / NASA
Before that flyby, the only image scientists had was a blurry one showing Ultima Thule’s oblong shape, resembling something like a bowling pin or a peanut.
“That image is so 2018... Meet Ultima Thule!” said lead investigator Alan Stern, doing little to hide his joy as he revealed a new sharper image of the cosmic body, taken at a distance of about 27,000km with a resolution of 140 meters per pixel.
“That bowling pin is gone — it’s a snowman if anything at all,” Stern said during a NASA briefing.
Ultima Thule’s surface reflects light about as much as “garden variety dirt,” he said, as the sun’s rays are 1,600 times fainter there than on Earth.
The body is about 30.6km long and completes its own rotation in about 15 hours.
NASA dubbed the larger lobe Ultima, and the other, which is about three times smaller, Thule.
“This is the first object that we can clearly tell was born this way” Stern said, instead of evolving as a sort of “bi-lobe.”
“This really puts the nail on the coffin now. We know that this is how these kinds of objects in many cases form,” he said.
About 4.5 billion years ago a cloud of frozen pebbles began to join forces, gradually forming two bodies — Ultima and Thule.
Slowing turning, they eventually touched each other at what mission geology manager Jeff Moore said was an “extremely slow speed” — maybe even only 1.6kph.
The lobes, are really just “resting on each other,” Moore said.
“New Horizons is like a time machine, taking us back to the birth of the solar system,” Moore said. “We are seeing a physical representation of the beginning of planetary formation, frozen in time.”
NASA researchers promised that fresh announcements would follow yesterday, including on the composition and atmosphere of Ultima Thule.
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