Ultima Thule

It is more difficult to get the public interested in celestial objects when they have names like "2014 MU69." Astronomers tend to name things initially and officially in that way but "sexier" names seem to come later more and more. (see this about that) This is a good thing. This site asks, "What's in a name?" A character from Shakespeare might say it doesn't matter, but I say it matters a lot.

The NASA team that works with the New Horizons exploratory spacecraft gave 2014 MU69 the nickname of Ultima Thule. Much better.

Thule was a mythical island that appeared on some old maps as being at the edge of the known world. It was also labeled as "Tile" on at least one map from 1539 called the Carta Marina. This was a map of what Nordic sailors knew about the world. They placed Thule near the Faroe Islands.

The Faroe Islands are not mythical. They (AKA Faeroe Islands) are a North Atlantic archipelago located 200 miles (320 km) north-northwest of the United Kingdom and about halfway between Norway and Iceland. Today they are an autonomous country of the Kingdom of Denmark with a total area of about 540 square miles and a population of over 50,000.

The direct translation of Ultima Thule is “beyond Thule” and is a very fitting name for something beyond the edges of our currently known world.

If you want to know a bit more about the space exploration side of Ultima Thule, check out this post on one of my other blogs. 

Thule (TILE) near the Faroe Islands - Carta Marina map, 1539.