On New Year’s Day, NASA will give “gifts” to the group of astronomers by gaining access to the oldest and oldest object in the solar system.
NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft is on the verge of closing in on the oldest and oldest object in the solar system in the history of human space science. The object, titled “Ultima Thule”, is located at the northern end of the solar map, on the border between the solar system and outer space.
Ultima Thule may be a meteorite in the Kuiper asteroid belt around the solar system, but because it is too far away, scientists are currently unsure of its shape. The only information available so far is the size and some estimates based on its shadow each time it crosses the Sun.
And today – January 1, 2019, every question on Ultima Thule will work. The New Horizons spacecraft will approach the meteor, sending us dozens of different information and images. Also from that moment on, the cosmic frontier that we know will officially widen, following in the “footsteps” of New Horizons.
“No one has ever seen an object on the Kuiper Belt, other than a few rays of light. No one has seen an object so cold that it almost reaches absolute zero. Ultima Thule may be that, but maybe we were wrong. – quotes Alan Stern, expert of the Southwest Research Institute, and head of mission this time.
NASA said the moment our ship approached Ultima Thule fell at 12:33 p.m. on January 1, 2018, Vietnam time. However, it takes more than 6 hours for the light to be returned to Earth, so it is expected that around 10 a.m. we will get the first information on Ultima Thule.
New Horizons is known to have been put into space in January 2006. It was the first ship to explore the most remote regions of the solar system. 9 years and nearly 8 billion kilometers of travel, New Horizons offers the first photos of Pluto (Pluto). After that, the ship continued its journey to Neptune’s orbit and found the most distant objects in the solar system.
In 2015, New Horizons gave us a real vision of Pluto
Until the 1990s, no one knew what was on the outskirts of the solar system. The sun is only 0.05% of what the Earth receives. So far, we know it’s the Kuiper Belt, filled with frozen meteorite fragments. They date back to ancient times, from when the solar system was formed.
In other words, the Ultima Thule is also the oldest object in the universe that we have ever seen, with a date of at least 4.6 billion years.
Stay tuned and find out what New Horizons has to offer. All information will be updated as soon as possible.
