Last week the news broke that NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft had flown by and photographed what looks like the “snowman of the universe,” two icy chunks stuck together like a snowman and spinning out there in the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune.
Yes, this object spins. Here’s a time lapse from NASA on New Years Day 2019.
The snowman is reddish and tiny, only 20 miles long, so he can’t be seen from Earth. We wouldn’t even know about him except that a few years ago the New Horizons team looked for something interesting for the spacecraft to explore after it passed Pluto. They saw him as a dot using the Hubble Space Telescope in 2014 and chose him because he’s a classical Kuiper Belt object with low inclination and low eccentricity.
How eccentric is a snowman in outer space? It depends on his orbit.
NASA named his big chunk Ultima and his small one Thule. The combo sounds like a name from science fiction but in fact Ultima Thule was the name ancient geographers gave to the northernmost land in the inhabited world. Back then it was somewhere in Iceland, Norway, or a remote Shetland Island. Now it’s beyond Neptune. (Click here to pronounce Ultima Thule. It’s not what you think.)
Ultima Thule’s real name is (486958) 2014 MU69. It’s just the right number of digits for a phone number, but don’t call it. The long distance charges are astronomical!
For more information, including a diagram showing how the snowman formed, read NASA’s New Horizons Mission Reveals Entirely New Kind of World.
p.s. I’m sure Ultima Thule is not the only snowman out there so he’s actually “A Snowman” in the universe, not “The Snowman.”
(images from NASA / Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory / Southwest Research Institute)
Sure, it’s “Thule”, like “Tule”.
Janet, to me it’s amazing that the ‘e’ is pronounced instead of silent. There seem to be different ways to say it depending on dialects of English. The “Emma Saying” pronunciation video says it’s “THU lee”. A video with an east-Indian accent says it “TU lee.”
One of the interesting things I learned from the news around this event is that the leader of the band Queen, Brian May, is also an astrophysicist with a PhD who is working on this project as well. Must be nice to be so smart!
I guess, since in CA we have tule, tule lake, the tule river, Tule Elk, and the cause of most traffic accidents in the state, tule fog, pronouncing the final “e” seems normal.