A boy named Sue. A girl named Beulah. These are some of the unfortunate names a child can have today. But such children have nothing to complain about in comparison to a cold, dark rock that is 6.5 billion kilometers from Earth. This object, no more than 30km long, has the most unfortunate of names—(486958) 2014 MU69.
And this just won't do. This large rock is about to become the second most famous object in the Kuiper Belt, which lies at the edge of the Solar System and is home to Pluto and a host of other similar sized dwarf planets and smaller objects. On January 1, 2019, the New Horizons spacecraft will fly by 2014 MU69, providing us with unprecedented information about smaller objects in the Kuiper Belt.
So NASA and the New Horizons science team need your help. They want to find a nickname for 2014 MU69 before the flyby, and they're holding a contest to do so. "We would like to use a more memorable nickname when we talk about our target body," wrote Mark Showalter, a SETI Institute scientist and member of the New Horizons science team, about the contest.
The science team is already considering some intriguing names, such as Año Nuevo ("New Year" in Spanish), Camalor (fictional city in the Kuiper Belt), Mjölnir (Thor's hammer), and Z'ha'dum (fictional planet at the edge of the galaxy). Nominations will be open until December 1, 2017. After the flyby, the New Horizon scientists will suggest a formal name—possibly the nickname used for the flyby—to the International Astronomical Union.
Since scientists selected 2014 MU69 as a follow-up target after the 2015 flyby of Pluto, the Kuiper Belt object has gotten more intriguing. In July, 2017, the object occulted a star, and telescopes observed its tiny shadow passing across the star. From this limited data, astronomers now believe the object is probably shaped like a skinny football and may in fact be a binary system rather than a single object. We'll know for sure in less than 14 months.
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