Ultima Thule, an icy celestial body floating 4.1 billion miles from the sun, is shaped like a giant snowman! Discovered in 2014, it is the farthest and potentially oldest cosmic body ever observed by a spacecraft.
Before this, the only image scientists had was a blurry one showing Ultima Thule’s oblong shape, resembling a bowling pin or a peanut. But images beamed back by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft shows Ultima Thule is a “contact binary” composed of two objects stacked one on the other, and is only 30 km long and 15 km wide and red in colour. Scientists believe that 4.5 billion years ago, a rotating cloud of small, icy bodies coalesced. Eventually, these two bodies remained, slowly spiralling closer until they touched. NASA dubbed the larger lobe Ultima, and the other, which is about three times smaller, Thule. The phrase ‘Ultima Thule’ is Latin for “a place beyond the known world”.
Ultima Thule is located in the Kuiper Belt, a region of space filled with icy bodies lying beyond the gas giant Neptune. This chilly expanse holds trillions of objects, remnants of the early solar system.
Picture Credit : Google
