New Horizons unveils a new world. Actually, it’s 2 worlds smashed together.

It’s a new, weird world. 

The deep space exploration craft New Horizons has sent back the first detailed images of an ancient world floating more than 4 billion miles from Earth, formally known as 2014 MU69. The clearest glimpse yet of MU69 shows that it’s shaped like a snowman, with two roundish lobes that have been fused together. 

It is by far the most distant world a spacecraft — and by extension humanity — has ever explored.

“What this spacecraft and this team accomplished is unprecedented,” Alan Stern, the principal investigator of the New Horizons mission, said from the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory on Wednesday. Read more…

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