Days ago, a leftover from the solar system's formation was minding its own business more than a billion miles beyond Neptune's orbit. Then, just as humans back on Earth celebrated the new year, a robotic explorer—NASA's New Horizons spacecraft—flew by the object at ten miles a second, snapping pictures and beaming them back home. Today, the New Horizons team shared with the world the first full-fledged images of the space rock, which is officially called 2014 MU69 and nicknamed by the team Ultima Thule.
Way back in 2018, researchers had speculated that the object was shaped like a bowling pin. Now we know that they have a frosty, 21-mile-tall snowman on their hands. The latest imagery of MU69 reveals that it is actually made of two roughly spherical lumps of rock and ice, seemingly welded together in a gentle collision and pirouetting in space every 15 hours or so. The images also show that MU69's two lobes measure 12 and nine miles across and are a ruddy, mottled brown.
Credits
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/science/2019/01/nasa-new-horizons-reveals-snowman-shape-mu69/
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