Ultima Thule: The NASA probe shows a more detailed picture of the farthest object ever explored in space Image caption According to scientists, Ultima Thule is a small body made of rocks and ice and composed of two objects.

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft released a new, more detailed image of the space object in the form of a snowman that he named Ultima Thule, a Latin term that means something like "a place beyond the known world".

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

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

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• Peanut or Snowman? Ultima Thule is a small body of rock and ice composed of two objects that have merged, reminiscent of something like a snowman or a peanut. [19] 19659007] It was discovered in 2014 by the Hubble telescope, but it is only now, with the flyby, that 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.

  Sharpest image

  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 another version of the picture taken with even greater resolution by the LORRI telescope (Imaging Long Range Recognition Imager), but its data has not yet been transmitted.

  The data recorded during the mission are sent very slowly due to

  As a result, it will take 20 months for all the photographs and other scientific observations to be received by NASA, even if all this information has been collected much less time during the flyover. Details of Ultima Thule

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

  NASA

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

  New Horizons located Ultima at 6.5 billion miles from Earth. It is in a region of the solar system known as the Kuiper Belt.

  The chances 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 the time to

  There are a number of factors that make Ultima Thule, and the region in which it moves, so interesting for scientists.

  One of them is that the sun is so weak in this region that temperatures are about 30 or 40 degrees above absolute zero – the lower end of the scale of temperature and the coldest that atoms and molecules can 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 to consider is the fact that this space object is small (about 33 km in its largest dimension). means that it does not have the kind 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 – there are very few collisions between objects. 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 big and evolve, or are hot …

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