The Far Reaches of Ultima Thule

Ancient cartographers used the name Ultima Thule to describe the edge of the known world. Thousands of years later, humanity reclaimed this name for a real object orbiting in the dark, frozen reaches of the Kuiper belt.

To the Romans, Ultima Thule represented the most distant northern land imaginable, serving as a mythical border beyond which nothing existed. This concept was finally anchored in reality when scientists gave the nickname to the furthest world ever explored by a spacecraft. This strange, snowman-shaped object orbits billions of miles from the sun, far beyond the reach of Neptune. It serves as a literal time capsule of the materials that formed our solar system.