From Meatball to Pancake

[krpalmer]

While I keep thinking I could put a bit more effort into following “space announcements,” I do have the habit of looking at the Astronomy Picture of the Day early on every day. A few days ago, it offered an update about Ultima Thule after New Horizon’s flyby, suggesting the two “circular lobes” of the Kuiper Belt object were a lot flatter than had been surmised and the approach had been from a somewhat lucky direction. I did get to thinking about previous suppositions the lobes had formed as rough spheres even if they hadn’t bothered to collapse into a bigger sphere under their low mutual gravity, and if those small potential spheres might have been used to insist “even pleasing roundness isn’t as significant as planetary scientists like Alan Stern insist; you’ve just got to bite the bullet and dismiss these small bodies as insignificant flecks in a larger system.” Again, I’m at least tempted to say “going out there and looking is more interesting than dealing with numbers.”