As soon as the new year begins, the news about space has been stomping. NASA has confirmed the successful flyby of the most distant world that humans have ever encountered.
As many watched fireworks explode in the night sky, billions of miles from this spectacle, NASA’s New Horizons space probe marked another astronomical milestone by making the closest approach to the most distant object ever visited by a spacecraft. .
That object, dubbed Ultima Thule , was first seen from a long distance by the Hubble Space Telescope in 2014, but it wasn’t until 2019 that scientists have been able to see it up close to better understand this mysterious mass.
Thanks to the overflight, which took New Horizons about 3,500 kilometers from Ultima Thule at 06:33 Spanish time on Tuesday, January 1, we now know that this ancient rotating object has the shape of a bowling ball, with approximate dimensions of about 32×16 kilometers.
Scientists from NASA, the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory and the Southwest Research Institute received the first images of the flyby as early as the New Year, due to the incredible distance that the data had to travel through space to reach Earth. .
This is because Ultima Thule is located about 6.4 billion kilometers from our planet, in a region of space still poorly understood called the Kuiper Belt, made up of thousands of ancient trans-Neptunian objects that orbit the Sun: frozen rock remnants from when the solar system was young.
New Horizons visited the most famous of these tiny atypical worlds, the dwarf planet Pluto, in 2015, and the Ultima Thule flyby represents the first major achievement of the probe’s “extended mission” after this: a milestone made even more remarkable when you consider that Ultima Thule hadn’t even been discovered when New Horizons was released back in 2006.
Since then, more than a decade of scientific advancements have helped us learn more about the Kuiper Belt and the strange worlds that might inhabit it, but there is no denying that this first close-up of a real Kuiper Belt object is an uncompromising achievement precedents.
“The data we have looks fantastic and we are already learning about Ultima Thule up close. From now on the data will get better and better!” Said lead researcher Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado. .).
So the new data will not take long to appear. This new information should help clarify some outstanding questions about this distant object, even if its shape actually masks two objects in close orbit (and not an integrated mass), and the time it takes for the rotating object to complete one rotation.
Reference / Image Credit: NASA
NASA expects to receive images of the flyby in the next few days. Here’s a low-resolution image taken before the flyby that gives us some details on the shape of Ultima Thule, which appears to be either a single bowling ball-shaped object or two objects orbiting each other.
