The Size of Space is Remarkable!
Ultima Thule is more than a billion miles on the far side of Pluto. This snowman-like space rock is approximately twenty miles long by ten miles wide and seems to spin like a propeller through space. Why? It is two objects fused together in a strange motion.
The object was discovered by the Hubble Space Telescope four years ago and named 2014 MU69. A public campaign hosted by NASA renamed it–“Ultima Thule” is a reference to the most distant place beyond the borders of the known world.
Yesterday, the NASA spacecraft New Horizons conducted a successful flyby of this remote space object. Over the next few days, scientists expect to receive more photographs of the most distant object ever visited by a spacecraft. Because the probe is so far from Earth, scientists say data on Ultima Thule will continue streaming to us until September 2020.
New Horizons measures only 7.2 by 6.9 by 8.9 feet. This tiny space probe is blazing through space in excess of 31,000 miles per hour – that’s faster than my Toyota! The scientific sophistication required to engineer and operate such a device are truly remarkable. The probe flew approximately four billion miles to reach Ultima Thule. However, the Milky Way Galaxy is more than 620,000,000,000,000 miles across. In twelve years of space travel, the probe has crossed 0.000645 percent of our galaxy. And the Milky Way is just one of more than two trillion galaxies in the known universe.
Which gives us just a tiny (really, really tiny) look at how large our universe is! For such huge space-time dimensions we require a new type of Mathematics. Here is one for you to check out.