One must love luscious scientific mysteries, and it appears Ultima Thule is dishing them up:
The larger bulbous end of the rock, called Ultima, is not spherical as we had thought, but flat, like a cookie. The smaller bulb, called Thule, is also somewhat squashed, like a walnut.
“The new images are creating scientific puzzles about how such an object could even be formed,” mission scientist Alan Stern said in a statement. “We’ve never seen something like this orbiting the sun.” [NewScientist]
NASA/Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory/Southwest Research Institute/National Optical Astronomy Observatory
Honestly, the graphic just looks like some supernova debris that hooked up.
