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Ultima Thule may actually be pancake-shaped


bison

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New images of Kuyper Belt Object Ultima Thule reveal it to be a pair of flattish disks, rather than two joined spheres. It isn't clear how it could have formed in this shape.

The planet Saturn has a couple of flattish moons, but these formed under great tidal stresses from the giant planet. These are Atlas, which orbits just outside Saturn's rings, and Pan which travels in a gap within one of the rings. 

Please find a linked article, below, for more information, including images of the newly-understood shape of Ultima Thule. 

https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/02/it-looks-like-ultima-thule-may-be-more-of-a-pancake-than-snowman/

 

Edited by bison
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Objects forming with an unusually high rate of spin could assume a flattish shape, due to centrifugal force, as long as the spin wasn't so great as to tear them apart. Ultima Thule, and especially Ultima, the larger, flatter lobe could have had an encounter with another Kuyper Belt Object that caused them to spin up in this manner. 

It's been wondered how Ultima Thule dissipated the momentum present when the two lobes encountered each other in space, and merged.   Perhaps this energy was spent in pulling each other into these flattened shapes. 

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covenant_capital_ship_by_deelekgolo.png
 

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