In January could Dagbladet and the rest of the world’s press tell about the spacecraft New Horizons’ images of the farthest object that has ever been attempted to be explored.
The time was described as a “snowman” in space, but Nasa scientists have now gained access to new images of Ultima Thule.
These images has got the scientists to shut up the eyes.
It has never been taken a picture of such a thing before. We have never seen something like this go in orbit around the sun, ” says Alan Stern, who is one of the leaders of New Horizons-the project, according to The Independent.
Video originally published on dagbladet.no/dbtv.no on 19.01.2015 This animasjonsvideoen shows NASA’s New Horizons journey to Pluto Show more New questions
The new images give namely a new perspective on the distant object floating in the Kuiperbeltet in the outskirts of our solar system. They show that the object is not far just around the as you first assumed.
The new analysis shows that the two sections are not shaped like spheres at all. The largest part is shaped as the Independent describes as a pancake, and the smaller part as a walnut.
Our impression of the Ultima Thule was based on the few images we got with a time the New Horizons flyby, but to get more data has changed our view significantly, ” says Stern.
– It’s better to say that the Ultima Thule is flatter, but it also makes us to ask more questions. Among other things, how such an object arose.
Billion
Ultima Thule has the official name 2014 MU69, and is around 33 kilometers far. It was found by the Hubble space telescope four years ago and was thus not even discovered when New Horizons was launched from Cape Canaveral in January 2006.
New Horizons was already assured of a place in the story after the summer of 2015 flew past Pluto, and sent home the very first nærbildene of the remove dvergplaneten.
the Probe is now in the so-called Kuiperbeltet, a remote region that extends from Neptune’s orbit and beyond.
The swarm, it is literally of billions of comets, millions of objects such as Ultima, which is called planetesimaler, and a handful of dvergplaneter the size of continents, as Pluto, ” said Stern when he met the press before the new year.
– This is important for the research because this region of the solar system, which is located very far from the sun, has maintained the original conditions from the origin for four and a half billion years ago. When we fly past the Ultima, we’ll see how things was at the very beginning.
AUDIO: This is the historic audio from the March, naboplaneten our that is 54 million kilometers away. Video: Nasa TV / NTB Scanpix. Clip: Ørjan Ryland View more Took the historical pictures of the “snowman” in space
