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posted by martyb on Wednesday January 02 2019, @10:46PM   Printer-friendly
from the picture-that! dept.

2014 MU69 has two nearly-spherical lobes and is a contact binary. The collision between the two lobes happened at a low relative velocity, causing little damage to the resulting object. The "neck" between the lobes contains brighter material which appears to be dust that has settled down the slopes that run towards the point of contact.

[Added BBC link -ed]


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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Thursday January 03 2019, @01:56AM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Thursday January 03 2019, @01:56AM (#781316) Journal

    Well, there was this kind of talk previously:

    Tiny Moon Possibly Orbiting 2014 MU69 [soylentnews.org]

    The moon, if it exists, might be about three miles [~5 km] wide, circling at a distance of about 120 miles [~190 km] from MU69, completing an orbit every two to four weeks, estimated Marc W. Buie, an astronomer at the Southwest Research Institute in Boulder, Colo.

    But it turned out to be nothing, apparently:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/(486958)_2014_MU69#2017_occultations [wikipedia.org]

    A preliminary analysis of all collected data suggested that 2014 MU69 was accompanied by an orbiting moonlet about 200-300 km away. It was later realized, however, that an error with the data processing software resulted in a shift in the apparent location of the target. After accounting for the bug, the short dip observed on 10 July is now considered to be a detection of the primary body.

    Could a significant (100+ meters?) satellite have gone undetected during the occultation campaign? We'll see. The speck thing seemed like an obvious candidate, but I didn't hear any discussion of it (I missed some bits of the live stream).

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