Scientists have released images of Ultima Thule, the most distant world ever studied. Here’s what you need to know.
(Getty)
Ultima Thule
On New Year’s Day, 2019, an interplanetary spacecraft called New Horizons had a historic encounter with a remote world. It sounds like something out of a science fiction story, but it isn’t. New Horizons, an unmanned NASA spacecraft, was out exploring Kuiper Belt, which is a region of icy bodies just past Pluto. The spacecraft flew past a remote space object known as Ultima Thule, took pictures, and collected data which it sent back to NASA scientists.
Now, scientists have analyzed the data and produced what they say is a fuller picture than we’ve ever had of the most remote world ever studied. Here’s what you need to know about Ultima Thule:
Remember the distant space rock called Ultima Thule? That was just a nickname, and scientists are now brainstorming formal names.
But there are some complications: https://t.co/NuTJ8C6ucN
Marina Koren (@marinakoren) May 17,2019
Ultima Thule has a scientific name: the remote object is known as 2014 MU69. Since that’s not a very catchy name, NASA also decided to give it a nickname. They eventually settled on Ultima Thule. The name itself probably dates back about a thousand years and has been used in Latin literature. It’s historically been used to describe remote, hard to reach places.
But in the twentieth century, the name became associated with White Supremacists and Nazis. In Hitler Germany, members of the Nazi Party started talking about an imagined land of Aryan purity which they called Ultima Thule. The name still carries Nazi associations. A Swedish rock band with links to neo-Nazis named itself Ultima Thule.
