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Glory of the Heavens

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Hey, it’s BB-8 out there in deep space:-)

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In my studies of Ultima Thule I have found that it’s just one big snowman hamburger floating around Neptune.

What’s really special about it, is that Brian May loves it so much that he wrote and recorded a quite literally “rock” song about it. And I think that’s beautiful.

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What do you think of the name "Ultima Thule" for a KBO? Apparently, some ancient cartographic confusion, built on a "Thule" no one can identify, led it to mean "the northernmost land," but then somehow neo-Nazis took "Thule" to mean the origin of the Aryans (in a pan-Aryan historiography, i.e., the Celts and the Indo-Aryans being one and the same)? (Of course, I have not a doubt in my head the astronomers were thinking of the former.)

I have no issues with the name. If we continue to ban things that Nazis have latched onto, then we’ll be left with very little. We need to stop the white supremacists people from hijacking everything.

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Ultima Thule is probably the best time capsule we’ve ever had for understanding the birth of our solar system and the planets in it.

Alan Stern, Ph.D., New Horizons Principal Investigator, Southwest Research Institute, Boulder, Colorado

An artist’s impression of NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft encountering 2014 MU69, nicknamed Ultima Thule, a Kuiper belt object about 21 miles in diameter that orbits the sun 4 billion miles from Earth. Source: NASA / Jhuapl.

It takes more than six hours for light to travel from Earth to the Kuiper Belt, so Midnight-celebrating scientists really won’t know until Tuesday morning, January 1, 2019, whether New Horizons was able to swivel its cameras as it flew by Ultima Thule in order to get images that aren’t just a blur. So the next step will come at 10:28 a.m. on January 1st when scientists listen for New Horizons “phone call” from more than 4 billion miles from Earth.

First Kuiper Belt Exploration

New Horizons was launched in 2006 as NASA’s first mission designed specifically to explore the outer solar system, the Kuiper belt, where sunlight is only 0.05 percent as strong as it is on Earth and temperatures are near absolute zero and have been since the beginning of our solar system 4.6 billion years ago. That means Ultima Thule has existed in a frozen state since it emerged.

“This is history-making, what we’re doing, in more ways than one. Ultima Thule is probably the best time capsule we’ve ever had for understanding the birth of our solar system and the planets in it,” says Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

6:30 PM December 31, 2018 – Powerful Radio Signal Sent to Ultima Thule

Six hours before New Horizons would reach Ultima Thule, scientists worked through the  Deep Space Network that NASA uses to communicate with distant spacecraft to send a powerful radio signal toward Ultima Thule, hoping the signal would interact with the rocky Thule about the same time New Horizons flew closest to study how the radio waves were reflected off the rocky body’s surfaces.

Ultima Thule’s Steady Brightness Is A Mystery

In August 2018, New Horizons first imaged Ultima Thule as a speck of light. Then this last week of December 2018, as New Horizons moved to its closest approach on January 1, 2019, at 12:33 AM EST, scientists assumed the rocky body would be spinning and so the light reflected off of it would brighten and dim. But Ultima Thule’s brightness has remained steady the whole time.

“It’s really puzzling, because we know the shape is irregular,” Dr. Stern said.

Big Bang Time Machine???

So why all this excitement about a tiny space rock only 37 kilometers across? It could help us answer some of the most fundamental questions about the creation of the solar system.

“Think of New Horizons as time machine that has brought us back to the very beginning of the solar system, to a place where we can observe the most primordial building blocks of the planets,” Moore said.

(via weveneverbeenalone)

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Mission scientists created this “departure movie” from 14 different images taken by the New Horizons Long Range Reconnaissance Imager (LORRI) shortly after the spacecraft flew past the Kuiper Belt object nicknamed Ultima Thule (officially named 2014 MU69) on Jan. 1, 2019. The central frame of this sequence was taken on Jan. 1 at 05:42:42 UT (12:42 a.m. EST), when New Horizons was 5,494 miles (8,862 kilometers) beyond Ultima Thule, some 4.1 billion miles (6.6 billion kilometers) from Earth. The object’s illuminated crescent is blurred in the individual frames because a relatively long exposure time was used during this rapid scan to boost the camera’s signal level – but the science team combined and processed the images to remove the blurring and sharpen the thin crescent. This is the farthest movie of any object in our Solar System ever made by any spacecraft. The images reveal an outline of the “hidden” portion of the Ultima Thule that was not illuminated by the Sun as the spacecraft zipped by, but can be “traced out” because it blocked the view to background stars also in the image.

Credits: NASA/Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute/National Optical Astronomy Observatory

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: Ultima Thule is the most distant world explored by a spacecraft from Earth. In the dim light 6.5 billion kilometers from the Sun, the New Horizons spacecraft captured these two frames 38 minutes apart as it sped toward the Kuiper belt world on January 1 at 51,000 kilometers per hour. A contact binary, the two lobes of Ultima Thule rotate together once every 15 hours or so. Shown as a blinking gif, the rotation between the frames produces a tantalizing 3D perspective of the most primitive world ever seen. Dubbed separately by the science team Ultima and Thule, the larger lobe Ultima, is about 19 kilometers in diameter. Smaller Thule is 14 kilometers across. via NASA

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Sooo… Turns out Ultima Thule, the farthest object ever inspected by a probe, is not “snowman” shaped, but consists of two rather flat parts !!! 

Image 1: New Horizons Long Range Reconnaissance Imager

Image 2:  NASA/Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute

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This Portuguese man o’ war isn’t quite one animal. I mean, it is… but it’s actually made up of a colony of tiny organisms all working together! 

For way more on these colonial creatures (and their venomous tentacles) here’s a nice overview from nationalgeo.

(h/t Kyle Hill at nerdistindustries)

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Percy Jackson series in less than 10 words

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Season 5 - Episode 6 “The Game”

Sneaky Wesley

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Photographer Captures Heartwarming Portraits of Blind Cats to Help Them Get Adopted

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Nailed it. (via moonicourt)

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Best part in the movie #startrek #enterprise #geek #derickjames #tattoo #traditional #movietattoo #startrektattoo #geektattoo #enterprisetattoo #tattooflash #classictattoo #oldschooltattoo #traditionaltattoo #nerdytattoos #vgta2 #tattoodo #tattoopins #beastieboys

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Bilbo: I have… I have never used a sword in my life.

Gandalf: And I hope you never have to. But if you do, remember this: true courage is about knowing not when to take a life, but when to spare one

*meanwhile, in another story*

Gimli: How many kills do you have, Legolas?

Legolas: 21!

Gimli: Damn! I’ll have to kill more orcs to catch up! What a fun game this is!

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this song makes me sad