The most remote place ever visited...Ultima-Thule!

new horizons has just discovered this a four and a half billion year old virgin pristine and untouched since the dawn of the solar system now just think about that for a second this thing has sat here on the edge of the solar system where it's cold and dark unchanged and immutable while the earth has done all of this it's called ultimatulay which means the most extreme limit of travel and discovery oh and boy is that such an app name on so many levels new horizons was the probe that hammered past pluto a few years back now visiting an object on the edge of the solar system is always a dilemma for a mission planner because you've got to give it lots of speed to get out there quickly but that also means that your flyby is quick so it limits the amount of data you can get so if you wanted a slow flyby of course that means you would have to fly out there slowly which means that the team that built it would probably be dead by the time it actually gets there and of course you can't pack enough fuel to stop when you get there because it would just make the spacecraft way too big because basically all of the fuel that you see here was what was needed to accelerate this tiny little craft up to about 10 or so kilometers per second and tiny is right this thing only weighs about half a ton and if you wanted to slow it down again to say go into orbit around pluto you would need at least that much fuel again so the new horizons team settled for a fast launch indeed it was the fastest launch ever and even at that it took about 10 years to get out to pluta it's so far out that when it transmits signals they take over five hours to get back to earth traveling at the speed of light now if you think that's impressive you can't see nothing yet because by the time you get out as far as pluto of course the sun is a tiny little dot in the sky in fact thanks to the inverse squared law by the time you get out as far as pluto the sun is less than one thousandth of the brightness that it is here on earth which of course would make solar panels almost pointless out this far in the solar system in fact there's a little side note only a real bonehead would propose using solar panels say out as far as i know saturn or something elon musk so anyway new horizons went for the only viable option for power this far out it's nuclear it's got a thermoelectric nuclear generator on it basically you use nuclear decay to make a block of typically a radioactive oxide hot and then use that thermal gradient across a peltier type device to generate power and it pumps out about 250 watts which is not even one-tenth of the energy you would need to run a kettle but what's more impressive is the transmitter on the new horizons runs at about 12 watts barely enough energy to run a led light bulb and that's what's transmitting all of the data back home and so when you actually get data back from new horizons it's being transmitted from a 12 watt transmitter on the edge of the solar system and of course because of this it's not the fastest of data transfers in fact it's death slow how death slow about half a megabyte per hour the sort of thing that would make dial-up modems seem blisteringly fast so how do we get all these beautiful images back from pluto with such a slow data transfer rate well the way it worked with pluto is as it flew by it stored loads of data and then it slowly transmitted it back to earth over the period of a year or so now it's actually been a couple of years since new horizons hammered past pluto and found it to be quite a bright object in a dark place like i was saying by the time you're out as far as pluto the sun is a little dot in the sky to the point where if you're to look out on pluto it's about 1 600 times fainter than it is here on earth or to look at it another way if you were to stand on pluto the sun is about 100 times brighter in the sky than the moon is here on earth it's about a hundred times brighter than the full moon in the sky so it would probably look more like heavy dusk terms here on earth now during the day pluto itself is quite a bright place being mostly coated with nitrogen ice which is very reflective not unlike the ice fields here on earth and not at all like our moon which is mostly grayish rock type stuff in fact the moon only reflects about 1 7 of the light that hits it whilst pluto reflects almost half of the light that hits it so if you would see the moon in the sky and pluto up next to it at the same distance it would be about half of the diameter or one quarter of the surface area but it would be almost as bright as the full moon it would be a very bright snowball next to a gray rock and rock's not actually that far off the moon is much denser than pluto i mean just to put it all into perspective the density of water is typically about one gram per cubic centimeter while rocks are two to four grams per cubic centimeter now the density of ice is somewhat lower than water it's about 0.9 grams per cubic centimeter but from this you can see that the objects on the edge of the solar system things like pluto have a density much more in line with water than they are with rocks and it's from this region out by the edge of the solar system where most of our comets come from and as they get closer to the sun they start to shed gas and reflective particles that come out with that and that's why the comets have tails and that's basically what you see pluto is very much an ice ball with a bit of a rocky core whereas most of the objects out this far are not even that they're just mostly dirty ice balls now it turns out though on the edge of the solar system it's actually pretty cold and so these objects which are mostly ice don't evaporate into space because they're so cold however if they fall onto a cometary orbit which brings them close to the sun then of course water when it gets up to a moderate temperature in a vacuum starts to outgas and that pulls off all the little reflective particles which is the tail of the comet however the most fascinating thing about the comets is just how low the density is i mean remember what i was saying ice is about 0.9 grams per cubic centimeter well these things are much lower than that they're about half the density of water and the only way you can get density that low is if there's lots of spaces within it it's much more like a snowball or an ice ball with lots of holes in it lots of porosity now it's long been observed that comets have weird shapes to them but you know a lot of them look like peanuts and such like leading to the interesting question did they form like that at the beginning of the solar system or is that shape just what they look like after they've gone into these elliptical orbits and being cooked by the sun for a bit well new horizons has just kind of answered that you see it was well known for a few years before the pluto flyby that new horizons would be at a bit of a loose end after that so what to do next so loads of ground-based telescopes scoured the area ahead of the new horizons flight path in the hope they would find something that new horizons could take a close look at with its mega fuel supplies now fortune really favored the braveheart in new horizons was launched 2005-ish fly by pluto in about 2015. ultimate toulet the thing that it's just flown by was only discovered in 2014 that's almost a decade after the launch of this probe no one on earth actually knew that ultimate toulet was there when the spacecraft was designed and launched however the calculations were done and the flyby was doable the slight downside though is this object was tiny i mean the moon's fairly small on the grand scheme of things pluto smaller still here in ballpark numbers the moon is about the size of america pluto would be about half the size of america ultima thule is more like the size of manhattan or to put it into perspective if you were to have the moon in the sky and the pluto next to it and then put ultimate toulet next to that you would need a telescope to see it now this problem was exacerbated for the new horizons probe in the ultimate two lights actually quite a dark object comparably dark to the moon and of course out here like i was saying there's less than a thousandth of the light that there is by earth so it's actually quite difficult to see these objects until you're right on top of them and given the limitations of the spacecraft's low data transfer rate and the time lag it was actually quite technically challenging just to point the camera in the right direction i mean just for perspective this is ultimate tool it's about 30 kilometers long the new horizons probe flew by within about 3000 kilometers of it give or take the moon's diameter or the size of the united states i mean it really is it's like sitting in california and trying to actually get a decent image of something about as far away as manhattan and it was traveling at about 14 kilometers per second 40 times the speed of sound five times the speed of a rail gun bullet the phrase faster than a speeding bullet just took on a whole new meaning [Music] so think about that a slug that big a slug that big going mach 7 puts a hole through six half inch steel plates this big just this little slug went through all of the all six of those and oh by the way can shoot a projectile like this well over a hundred miles at mach 7. seven times the speed of sound seven times the speed of sound oh that's kind of cute kind of quaint the military man is impressed with seven times the speed of sound whereas new horizons here has been traveling over 40 times the speed of sound and has been doing it for over a decade yeah that's the sort of speed where you really want to make sure there aren't any undetected moons or surprises like that which is another one of the reasons why they had all of these telescopes looking at ultimate toulet just as a safety check so traveling at about 50 000 kilometers per hour the flyby here would take about one hour and how long does it take the signals from the spacecraft to get back to earth about five to six hours so the combination of trying to point the spacecraft cameras this really small fairly dark object whose position oh wasn't entirely certain and you know due to the time lags you've really just got to program the spacecraft up and hope for the best oh and boy did fortune favor the bold this time what they found was a virgin contact binary like i was saying these objects typically have very low density so any modest speed collision would make a complete mess of these objects and the main fact that you've got these basically perfectly spherical gently touching spheres points to a very gentle accretion near the birth of the solar system and of course this far out it's cold really cold such that the volatile stuff like water or carbon monoxide doesn't get burnt off and as is often the way with accretion you can form multiple centers of gravity hell someone like one third of the stars that we can see are binary stars in fact you might even argue that our solar system is a failed binary star with jupiter being the second failed star so it looks that likewise with the accretion of ultimate tula two centers formed that through one mechanism or another lost momentum such that the two bodies formed a gentle contact binary so what's the actual density of ultimate toulet well no one really knows for certain i mean you get some ballpark estimates from the fact that it's not flowing apart or something but the real problem is the gravity of an object this small is tiny i mean for certain some of the comets that we've actually visited and measured the gravity of jumping would give you escape velocity so a common way of actually measuring the density of an object is just to fly past it and see how much your course is perturbed by the gravity of the object that gives you the object's mass and of course you know the object size therefore you know its density but the gravity here is so low that they've not got a sensible estimate of its density but it's lightly comparable to other comets now as objects get heavier which mostly means bigger they get more gravity and eventually that's enough to crush this sort of fluffy porous ice type material into solid ice which is about the sort of time where these objects would start to get squished into more spherical objects it's also about the sort of time when the densest stuff which thanks to the heat of accretion and the radioactive decay in these rocky type materials allows these denser objects to sink to the middle of the planet which is basically how you get things like pluto which have a rocky core and an icy mantle or things like the earth you get the very dense stuff in the middle the iron and the nickel and then you get the less dense stuff like basically the rock mantle further out and then on the top you get the really low density stuff like water and the atmosphere now ultimate toulet is nowhere near any of this and like i was saying it's not that clear what the density is but it's likely to be comically low this is likely a barely held together dust bunny from the very beginning of this solar system in real color the surface of this object is more of a dark red fairly similar to some of the dark patches on pluto and caron which are due to organic compounds that have been roasted albeit very very slowly by high energy particles from the sun and from the universe in general this object is also almost unique in the entire solar system due to the lack of craters on an ancient surface so this is roughly the area in our solar system from where our comets originated now it it'd been long known that comets tended to have these weird peanut type shapes and there was lots of speculation lots of models but no one knew for certain if that's how they actually formed or they actually formed small spherical objects and eventually got burnt down by the sun to these more peanut type shapes but ultimate thule has laid that to rest in spectacular fashion our earth is a hot dynamic and turbulent place but even some of the large colder moons like triton have cryovolcanism the solar system has been far from a static place since its birth but not everywhere this is the most virginal pristine most unchanged body yet discovered by man in all likelihood all but unchanged since the dawn of the solar system itself it's an amazing discovery made all more impactful by the fact that even if we wanted to send another probe and we could launch it tomorrow it would be at least another 10 years before we would get another look at such an object and for this i really really tip my hat to the people who ran this project from the design of the probe to the launch to the execution of the mission itself such that we could see for the first time this ancient silent watcher frozen in time right on the edge of the unknown yes ultima toulet a more apt name couldn't have been given a distant unknown region the extreme limit of travel and discovery so if you enjoyed this video give it a thumbs up and ring the notification bell and if you really enjoyed it subscribe and maybe consider supporting this channel through patreon [Music] you

Channel: Thunderf00t

Views: 311,470

Keywords: ultima, thule, pluto, nasa, comet, kuiper, moon, jupiter, astronomy, science, amazing, interesting, most, distant, distance, light year, light, solar, system, launch, new, horizons, new horizons

Id: LMp1EDl2wB8

Length: 17min 35sec (1055 seconds)

Published: Mon Jan 14 2019