Strange Mounds on Kuiper Belt Object Arrokoth Could Be Traces of Where It Came From

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The most distant object ever explored up close might just have revealed one of the earliest stages of planet formation., the Kuiper belt object known for its reddish hue and bi-lobed snowman shape, has bumpy mounds all over its larger lobe, and these may be the remnants of boulders that once smooshed together to create the whole object., a team led by planetary scientist Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute made a close study of the lobe, known as Wenu.

Previous studies have shown that Arrokoth was once two smaller objects in a binary orbit that gradually came together and fused, but there's a lot more to its formation history. Ashowed that it was actually a whole bunch of objects in a complex orbital dance that gently came together under gravity at low speeds to form a larger rock.

Using two close-up images from the New Horizons flyby, Stern and his colleagues conducted an in-depth analysis of the mounds of Wenu. They counted, in total, 12 mounds, generally about 5 kilometers across, and with similar length-to-width ratios, in addition to other similarities.

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