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Today’s post takes us back, once more, to Ultima Thule/2014 MU69, the distant snowman shaped planetoid at the edge of the solar system which was visited by the New Horizons space probe as it flies through the Kuiper Belt on its way out of the solar system (since that time, we also blogged about the color Thulian pink–which is based on the fantasy land at the northern edge of the medieval map). Well, space can be a confusing place, and, even with digital cameras, the way we see objects tumbling through the void can be misleading. As New Horizons flew away from Ultima Thule, it turned its cameras around and took the following shot (which hopefully shows up in all of its glory as an animated gif below).
Holy hemispheres! What is with that bright edge? Spheres certainly don’t have those! It turns out that Ultima Thule may not be a snowman as originally billed. Instead it seems more like a double pancake.
This news will please flat earthers (on the off chance they believe that New Horizons actually exists), but they shouldn’t read too much into it. Planets are spherical because they are so massive that the force of gravity causes them to collapse into the most efficient shape – a sphere. This is broadly true for objects with a diameter greater than 1000 kilometers (621 miles) and Ultima Thule was not even remotely that big (indeed we didn’t think it was a sphere before). I do wonder how these two smushed snowballs formed and came together though.
Enthusiasts of Kuiper Belt objects will have to discard the snowman analogy and look for an object which is a lumpy disk stuck to a smaller lumpy disk. It sounds like a hogchoker to me (see a picture of the flatfish below), but this may merely be a shallow pretext to link to my flounder art on Instagram. It might be a while before we discover anything even remotely shaped like a flatfish in space though so I am going to take what the universe offers. If you have better topological analogies feel free to share in the comments (after you follow my Instagram).
It’s an exciting new year in space exploration and today we are getting back images from the most distant object ever explored by a probe spacecraft. Launched in January of 2006, NASA’s amazing New Horizons mission (pictured above) has been flying through the solar system ever since. Back in 2014 it reached its primary objective, the icy dwarf world Pluto, which has been the focus of considerable interest and, arguably, of even greater controversy concerning astronomical naming conventions (“My Very Educated Mother Just Served Us….Nothing.” could arguably teach us about astronomy AND independent food preparation, I suppose). Since that time, New Horizons has continued to fly further from the Sun and deeper into the Kuiper Belt, a dark distant band of icy pseudo-worlds at the edge of the Solar System. New Horizons just flew past one of these Kuiper Belt objects…the distant ice ball 2014 MU69.
This frozen miniature planet is only 35 by 15 km (20 by 10 miles in diameter) and it orbits the sun every 298 years. The most exciting part of this body is its shape. It is literally a snowman—a smaller spherical lump of ice frozen to a larger one. Just look at it! You can practically see Charlie Brown half-building it and then giving up with a silent outer space “Good Grief”
Sadly, the mission has generated another astronomical naming controversy. Scientists were dissatisfied with the way “2014 MU69” rolled off the tongue so they crowdsourced the problem to the internet to find names for this distant iceball. The internet suggested “Ultima Thule” which was a Roman and Medieval term for the unknown icy lands beyond the periphery of the known world. That is a pretty good name and the scientists split it into two for the weird binary snowman (the larger body is “Ultima” and the smaller is “Thule”). Unfortunately, though, Nazi occultists also found the name “Thule” back in the thirties and they used it as a mythical place of origin for the mythical Aryan Race (sorry Nazis, we are all originally African).
Like all good-hearted people, I despise Nazis…but this seems like a Roman name sullied by racist morons more than a millennium after its introduction. Do you think scientists need to rename this primitive snowman world? Or should we go with Ultima Thule? Or should we just stick with 2014 MU69 (since, frankly, unless New Horizons discovers some strange artifacts, alien beings, or something we are probably never going to think about this corner of the solar system again).
ferrebeekeeper 