For most of its long history, Ultima Thule, or the word Thule alone, has been used to describe places beyond the limits of the known world, such as hard-to-reach Arctic lands.īut the name picked up more sinister associations in recent history. Scientists had nicknamed the object Ultima Thule, a centuries-old phrase with roots in Latin literature. What does this thing look like? What’s so cool about it? And why does it share a name with a term used by Nazis? No space mission had ever visited a target so far away, and NASA even held a New Year’s Eve party for scientists and engineers to count down to the historic pass around midnight. The New Horizons spacecraft flew past one of these objects, snapping pictures and collecting scientific data as it went.
The small bodies here, in a region known as the Kuiper Belt, were left out in the cold, and have remained virtually unchanged all this time. Gravitational forces pulled and smoothed some of the dust into spheres-the planets and moons. They form a ring around the solar system, silent sentries guarding the blazing sun, which is so distant that it looks like any other star would.īack in the day, about 4.6 billion years ago, the solar system was little more than a cloud of cosmic dust spinning around a newborn star.
They number in the millions, some half the size of the continental United States, others as small as cities. Go beyond Earth and deeper into the solar system, past the craggy terrain of Mars and the shape-shifting storm of Jupiter, through the delicate rings of Saturn, beyond the silky clouds of Uranus and Neptune, and you will find a mysterious zone of small, icy objects.
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