NASAs New Horizons mission team has published the first image of the farthest world ever explored — a planetary building block and Kuiper Belt object clicked during New Years 2019 flyby of Ultima Thule which looks like a human being in deep meditation.
Called “2014 MU69”, the object — detailed of which are published in the May 17 issue of journal Science — looks like a human being sitting in a meditative pose, an ancient relic from the era of planet formation.
The flyby of Ultima Thule was the farthest exploration of an object in history – nearly 6.4 billion km from Earth. The object is a contact binary, with two distinctly differently-shaped lobes.
At about 36 km long, Ultima Thule consists of a large, strangely flat lobe (nicknamed Ultima) connected to a smaller, somewhat rounder lobe (nicknamed Thule), at a juncture nicknamed “the neck.”
The lobes likely once orbited each other, like many so-called binary worlds in the Kuiper Belt, until some process brought them together in what scientists have shown to be a “gentle” merger.
The alignment of the axes of Ultima and Thule indicates that before the merger the two lobes must have become tidally locked, meaning that the same sides always faced each other as they orbited around the same point.
New Horizons researchers are also investigating a range of surface features on Ultima Thule, such as bright spots and patches, hills and troughs, and craters and pits.
Some smaller pits on the Kuiper Belt object, however, may have been created by material falling into underground spaces, or due to exotic ices going from a solid to a gas and leaving pits in its place.
Scientists found evidence for methanol, water ice, and organic molecules on Ultima Thule’s surface – a mixture very different from most icy objects explored previously by spacecraft. (IANS)
