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Ultima Thule
On New Year's Day, 2019, an interplanetary spacecraft called New Horizons had a historic encounter with a distant world. It sounds like a science fiction story, but it's not. New Horizons, an unmanned spacecraft of NASA, was exploring the Kuiper Belt, a region of icy bodies just after Pluto. The spacecraft flew over a distant space object called Ultima Thule, took pictures and collected data that it sent back to NASA scientists.
Now, scientists have analyzed the data and produced what they say is a more complete picture than we have ever had in the world's farthest ever studied. Here is what you need to know about Ultima Thule:
1. Some people are angry at the "Nazi" legacy of his name
Ultima Thule has a scientific name: the remote object is called 2014 MU69. As this name is not very catchy, NASA has also decided to give it a nickname. They finally opted for Ultima Thule. The name itself probably dates back about a thousand years and has been used in Latin literature. It has always been used to describe remote and hard-to-reach places.
But in the twentieth century, the name became associated with white supremacists and Nazis. In Nazi Germany, members of the Nazi party began talking about an imaginary country of Aryan purity that they called Ultima Thule. The name still carries Nazi associations. Ultima Thule is a Swedish rock band linked to neo-Nazis. A group of white supremacists from Portland, Oregon, published a newspaper filled with anti-Semitic and racist articles that they called Thule.
Alan Stern, chief scientist of the New Horizons mission, said NASA wanted to recover its old name:
"I think New Horizons is an example, one of the best, in our time of raw exploration, and the term Ultima Thule, very old, centuries old and maybe over 1,000 years, is a wonderful word for exploration. Said Stern. And that's why we chose it. And I would say that just because some bad guys have already liked the term, we will not let them away. "
2. His body looks like a gigantic snowman
Ultima Thule has been compared to a gigantic flattened snowman. His "head" is known as Thule and his flattened and rounded body is called "Ultima". This distant space object is located in the icy expanses of the Kuiper Belt, behind Pluto. It is so far from the sun that it receives no light or heat. Ultima Thule revolves around the sun, but the process is slow and slow; It takes 293 years for Ultima Thule to be successful once around the sun.
Scientists say they have never seen space objects with such strange shapes. In fact, Ultima Thule has them re-evaluate what they know about space rocks. New Horizons leader Alan Stern said, "He is sending the global scientific community back to the drawing board to understand how planetesimals – the building blocks of the planets – are formed."
3. Ultima Thule was formed during the fusion of two rocky space bodies
Ultima Thule consists of two spatial objects that have merged at one time in the past. The "head" or smaller object is called "Thule", and the widest and shallowest part is called "Ultima". Scientists say their two bodies were formed by a gentle collision between the two bodies. They say that the collision was probably so peaceful that there was no damage to one or the other body. In fact, some authors have compared the fusion of the two bodies to an "eternal hug" between two frozen objects, far beyond the heat of the sun.
Here's how scientists describe the formation of Ultima Thule:
"All available evidence indicates that the MU69 is rather the product of a collision or a smooth fusion of two independently formed bodies, possibly touching (or slower than their mutual gravitational descent speed). ", reads in the article by The Horizons chef, Alan Stern and dozens of his colleagues.
4. Its surface is red, icy and marked by hills and valleys
Ultima Thule is located approximately 4.1 billion kilometers from the Earth. Its surface is reddish brown (some people have compared it to a potato). It does not have satellites or rings. Its raised surface has many features ranging from hills to small valleys and furrows. Scientists say they have also observed traces of ice and organic molecules on the surface of Ultima Thule, as well as traces of methane.
5. More data on Ultima Thule are still coming
The New Horizons Space Shuttle flew over Ultima Thule on New Year's Day 2019. It was then that she began sending data back to scientists on Earth for analysis. But not all the data has been transmitted yet. NASA says final data on Ultima Thule will reach them by the middle of 2020. They hope to learn more about Ultima Thule – but also about how far space objects work and interact with each other.
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