Ultima Thule: The NASA probe shows a more detailed picture of the farthest object ever explored in space | Science and health

• Ultimate Thule: The Nasa Probe Flies Over a Remote Celestial Object

This is the farthest celestial object ever explored, about 6.5 billion kilometers from the Earth.

The spacecraft was able to approach him on January 1 and record footage when it was only 6,700 km away.

According to scientists, Ultima Thule is a small body of rock and ice composed of two objects that have melted one in the other, reminiscent of something like a snowman or peanut.

It was discovered in 2014 by the Hubble telescope, but only now, with the flyover, the details of its surface have become clearer.

New Horizons approached Ultima Thule because NASA wanted to exploit something beyond Pluto and that object was achievable.

The new surface photo was obtained with a special probe camera, the Multicolor Visible Imaging Camera (MVIC), and offers a resolution of 135 pixels per meter.

There is also another version of the image taken with even higher resolution by the LORRI (Imaging Long Range Recognition Imaging) telescope, but its data has not yet been transmitted.

The data recorded during the mission are sent very slowly because of their distance from the Earth.

As a result, it will take 20 months for all photographs and other scientific observations to be received by NASA, even though all this information was collected much less time during the flyby.

The details of Ultima Thule

The details visible up to now are however already considered fascinating.

The images allow you to see the defined outline of several holes on the surface.

The total length of the "snowman" is about 33 km.

Researchers will need to determine if the holes are impact craters or voids created by another type of process – such as leakage of volatile materials.

The New Horizons located Ultima at 6.5 billion kilometers from the Earth. It is in a region of the solar system called Kuiper Belt.

The risk of collision with other objects should be extremely low, but this snowman was probably created early in the formation of the solar system and had time to leave at least some scars.

What is so special about the Kuiper belt?

Several factors make Ultima Thule and the region in which it moves so interesting for scientists.

The first is that the sun is so weak in this region that temperatures exceed zero or 40 degrees approximately the absolute zero – the lowest end of the temperature scale and the coldest that atoms and molecules may eventually reach. As a result, chemical reactions in the region hardly occur. This means that Ultima Thule is at a gel level such that it is probably perfectly preserved in the state in which it has formed.

Another factor is that this space object is small (about 33 km in its largest dimension), which means that it does not have the type of "geological engine" that, in larger objects, usually reshapes his compositions.

A third factor is simply the very quiet nature of the environment in the Kuiper Belt.

Contrary to what happens in the inner solar system – the name given to the region including inner planets and asteroids – collisions between objects are very rare. Professor Alan Stern, principal investigator of New Horizons, said: "We will learn everything about Ultima – from its composition to its geology, how it was originally grouped, if it has satellites and from an atmosphere, etc. type – will teach us about the original conditions of formation in the solar system that all the other objects from where we left, this orbit, fly over and where we land can not tell us why they are tall and evolve, or are hot. "