New NASA photos show a mysterious rock space

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft approached a mysterious space rock at the beginning of the year – and dubbed it 2014 MU69. At first glance, it looks like a stiff snowman or maybe a deformed peanut. However, new photos allow you to see that it is flatter than you thought – closer to the shape of a pancake than a peanut.

The first pictures sent to Earth revealed an object composed of two segments touching each other. Both parties initially appeared round, but the new series of profile images has a flatter shape. Most of it looks like a giant pancake, according to Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab, and to the smallest crumpled peanut.

"The new images create a scientific puzzle about how such an object could even be formed," says Alan Stern, research scientist at the New Horizons mission. Already astronomer of the Southwest Research Institute planetarium, Alex Parker, similar forms appear on Saturn's moons, but they are formed in a particular environment of the planet's rings, while the MU69 2014 is formed in the # 39, deep space. 19659003] The stone is 4.1 billion kilometers from the Earth in the Kuiper Belt – a vast expanse of icy objects orbiting the Sun at the ends of the solar system. During his 21 km journey, New Horizons took pictures with his two cameras and collected 50 GB of data.

Researchers are not quite sure that the most recent model is the exact shape of the stone. There is always a whole piece that has not been illuminated by the Sun, which means that part of its shape is still estimated. Whatever the final form, the results animate the researchers. "We have never seen anything like this in orbit around the Sun," says Stern.