New Horizons team unravels the many mysteries of Ultima Thule
Phys.org
March 18, 2019
The farthest object ever explored is slowly revealing it's secrets, as scientists piece together the secrets of Ultima Thule - the Kuiper Belt object (KBO) NASA's New Horizons spacecraft flew past on New Year's Day, four billion miles from Earth.
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Ultima Thule is the first unquestionably primordial contact binary ever explored.
Approach pictures of Ultima Thule hinted at a strange, snowman-like shape for the binary, but further analysis of images, taken near closest approach - New Horizons came to within just 2,200 miles (3,500 kilometers) - have uncovered just how unusual the KBO's shape really is.
At 22 miles long, Ultima Thule consists of a large, flat lobe [nicknamed "Ultima"] connected to a smaller, rounder lobe [nicknamed "Thule"].
The strange shape is the biggest surprise, so far, of the flyby.
"We've never seen anything like this anywhere in the solar system," said New Horizon's Principal Investigator Alan Stern, of the Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colorado.
"It is sending the planetary science community back to the drawing board to understand how planetesimals - the building blocks of the planets - form."
More + video:
https://phys.org/news/2019-03-horizons-team-unravels-mysteries-ultima.html
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