SNAPSHOTS FROM SPACE

摘要

IT'S ONE AMONG millions. Nothing special drew New Horizons to 2014 MU69 (nicknamed "Ultima Thule"),except that it was in the right place at the right time for the fast-flying spacecraft to zip past it. And yet, merely by visiting it, we made 2014 MU69 special, turning it from a dot in the sky so faint that it's only visible to Hubble into the double-lobed world in this photo. New Horizons will spend another year returning all its data from the encounter, and scientists will spend years-perhaps decades-debating how this odd little binary thing formed and evolved. In the meantime, data artists like Thomas Appéré will help us imagine what 2014 MU69 would look like if we could only travel the more than 6 billion kilometers (4 billion miles) that separates Earth from it.