A vaguely hourglass-shaped icy object called Arrokoth residing in the far reaches of the solar system — the most distant body ever explored by a spacecraft — is giving scientists intriguing clues about the formation of the planets including Earth.
Scientists on Thursday offered the fullest description yet of the composition and origin of Arrokoth based on data from NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, which whizzed past it last year.
Arrokoth, located 4.1 billion miles (6.6 billion km) from Earth in a region beyond the planet Neptune called the Kuiper Belt, boasts a uniformly reddish surface that is smooth and undulating with few craters. It is coated with frozen methanol — a type of alcohol — and unidentified complex organic molecules.