The farthest explored object from Earth is essentially a giant rocky snowman

NASA's New Horizons probe traveled billions of miles from Earth just to find a big old snowman floating in space.

Just after midnight on New Year's Day, New Horizons conducted a flyby mission to Ultima Thule, an 18-mile-long hunk of rock floating about a billion miles past Pluto. The successful mission makes Ultima Thule the farthest explored object in our solar system. And on Wednesday, the probe sent back its first color image from the flyby, which depicts what looks like two rusty chunks of snow stuck together.

NASA already knew Ultima Thule, found in Kuiper Belt of asteroids and comet dust beyond the major planets, was a binary object. Its two chunks, literally named Ultima and Thule, probably collided "no faster than two cars in a fender-bender ... as early as 99 percent of the way back to the formation of the solar system," per the New Horizons press release.

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The rest of the probe's data on Ultima Thule is set to arrive over the next 20 months, the New Horizons team says. That leaves plenty time to come up with a better Earth-centric comparison for the image we already have. Kathryn Krawczyk