The spinning snowman revealed
Feb 27, 2019
1 minute
J. KELLY BEATTY
n the weeks following New Horizons’ flyby of 2014 MU , better known by the nickname ‘Ultima Thule’ (pronounced UL-ti-muh TOO-lee, meaning ‘beyond the known world’), the slow trickle of observations have morphed from a 26th-magnitude blip barely observable by the Hubble Space Telescope into a tiny, colourful and intriguing two-lobed object. It’s made of two roundish worlds nestled against each other, with one lobe somewhat larger than the other, and a combined length of 33 km.
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