NASA's Photos of Ultima Thule Suggest Long-Ago Moons

"Scientists from NASA's New Horizons mission released the first detailed images of the most distant object ever explored," reports the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab (which is operating the spacecraft). "Its remarkable appearance, unlike anything we've seen before, illuminates the processes that built the planets four and a half billion years ago."

Tablizer (Slashdot reader #95,088) shares their report: "The new images -- taken from as close as 17,000 miles (27,000 kilometers) on approach -- revealed Ultima Thule as a "contact binary," consisting of two connected spheres. End to end, the world measures 19 miles (31 kilometers) in length. The team has dubbed the larger sphere "Ultima" (12 miles/19 kilometers across) and the smaller sphere "Thule" (9 miles/14 kilometers across). The team says that the two spheres likely joined as early as 99 percent of the way back to the formation of the solar system, colliding no faster than two cars in a fender-bender...

Data from the New Year's Day flyby will continue to arrive over the next weeks and months, with much higher resolution images yet to come.
Space.com reports that astronomers are now hunting for moons near Ultima Thule. At a Thursday news conference, a New Horizons co-investigator from the SETI Institute explained that the rotation of Ultima Thule appears to have been slowed by orbiting moons, and the discovery of "Any moon at all, on any orbit at all, will tell us the mass and the density to pretty decent usable precision." Although it's also possible that the moons of Ultima Thule have since drifted away.

Space.com adds that the New Horizons spacecraft "has enough fuel and power, and is in good enough health, to potentially fly past a third object, if NASA grants another mission extension."

Were They Their Own Moons?

[Toad-san]

With damn-all in the vicinity (I mean, where would those moons go, right?), one would think the two chunks orbiting one another over the eons until they finally slowed enough to gently ease together (that "fender bender" is a catching image) would've done the trick. With no need for mythological missing moons.

Re:

[jfdavis668]

Why would they slow? Without friction, they would just orbit forever. You need to transfer energy to some other object to lose orbital velocity.

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[Hognoxious]

Why would they slow?

Why don't you ask someone with experience? Try that big white ball in the night sky. It's been there, done it and got the t-shirt.

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[RockDoctor]

That moon is in a considerably different situation - it is in orbit around something with a coating of liquid (that's Earth ; I'm depressingly sure that some Slashdotters will need telling that) which allows much more tidal coupling of the two bodies. So the rotational angular momentum of Earth is being transferred to the Moon, slowly. About 2cm/year slowly.

That might have happened between these two - but only during a relatively small time slot when the decay of short-lived isotopes might have made the bo

Alternative theory:

[Gravis Zero]

This is an action shot of a asteroid giving birth. ;) #MyIgnoranceIsAsGoodAsYourKnowledge

Great, but is it?

[Sqreater]

This seems to be nothing more than what I call "busy tech." - lotsa fun, but what exactly is the resulting knowledge good for? Is it actually worth the effort?

Re:

[dotancohen]

Just like the moon landings, then.

By the way, did you use a computer to post to /.? What exactly spurred on the development of the CPU in that machine? Or the project management practices used to develop it? Or the networks used to get the message off your machine and onto mine?

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[pauljlucas]

The moon landings were about beating the Russians into and for dominance of space and the moon. They were not science for science's sake.

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[RockDoctor]

The moon landings were about beating the Russians into and for dominance of space and the moon.

So, a failure then. The Russians still have pretty much as much space activity as the USA. Russians plus ESA or the Chinese would out-activity the USA. And the Chinese and Indians are coming too.

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[pauljlucas]

It was a success for its time, the late 1960s during the cold war. It's myopic to suppose that any success (regardless of when it was done or why) would remain the dominant success for eternity.

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[Sqreater]

Actually WW2. Semiconductors came out of German/American research and came about in the early 50s in a commercial use sense. Etc, etc, etc. The first cpus were contracted for by calculator makers. Nasa used primitive computers and core memory.