Leftover debris could tell scientists about the evolution of the solar system

What they found: Ultima Thule — which is located 1 billion miles from Pluto in a part of space called the Kuiper Belt — likely formed when two objects gently smushed together during the early days of the solar system.

• This type of formation runs counter to one of the leading theories that these deep space objects formed in chaos, violently crashing into one another at the speed of a bullet.
• But if the two lobes of 2014 MU96 — unofficially called Ultima and Thule — smacked into each other at those speeds, “they would blow each other to smithereens,” study co-author Alan Stern told Axios.
• Instead, New Horizons found the two lobes touching one another, forming what’s known as a “contact binary.”

The backdrop: New Horizons made its flyby of Ultima Thule on Jan. 1. The spacecraft launched from Earth in 2006 on a mission to Pluto. New Horizons made its planned encounter with Pluto in 2015.

What’s next: The new study was reportedly written with only about 10% of data collected during the flyby, so future studies should reveal even more about the nature of MU69 and other objects.

• New Horizons is still in good health. Scientists working on the mission are now looking to the future, thinking about another possible extended mission.