The Farthest Flyby Pt. 2

Note: This is ported content from my previous blog. It may appear in a format different than intended. It is also from a version of myself that was younger and dumber. I like to keep this content around for posterity.

In the The Farthest Flyby Pt. 1, I talked about the New Horizons space probe and the beaten record. Now, it’s more than a month beyond the flyby, and two photos came out, one early and less detailed and one with more detail.

What we know about it is that it is a bi-lobed object, known as a contact binary (this term can also be used for stars, but in this case refers to minor objects). These objects are rare in our solar system, and most are comets. I personally don’t know how these things are formed, and I might research that later, but it’s just super cool. When this body was first observed, people weren’t sure if it was a contact binary or just two bodies really close to one another, but I personally hoped for a contact binary, so that is my dream come true. Higher quality images are still to come, because it takes a long time to get the data back, considering the transmit speed and the distance. I’m personally intrigued by the band where the objects meet, you can clearly see it’s lighter, and I’m also interested in the crater on the smaller body, which is huge compared to the size of the object. What formed that crater, and what’s the difference between the material on the two asteroids and the center. Do the two bodies have different materials? It looks fairly uniform, but we don’t have too much detail. Also, I’m wondering if the material at the impact zone is lighter in the image due to mixing, heat, and pressure turning it into something else. This object is very weird and not what we expect, which is what makes this so exciting. Pluto, thought to be a cold ice world too far for the sun and too small to have anything crazy going on, turned out to be very vibrant of a world, and I can’t wait to think of what crazy secrets Ultima Thule will reveal as the data is beamed back.

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