Ultima-Thule, the 21-mile-wide (34 kilometers) body visited by NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft on Jan. 1 is now officially known as Arrokoth.
The new name means “sky” in the Powhatan/Algonquian language. The New Horizons team got the consent of Powhatan tribal representatives before proposing Arrokoth to the IAU.
Ultima Thule is the farthest cosmic body ever visited by a spacecraft.
Its technical name is 2014 MU69, but the New Horizons team nicknamed it Ultima Thule after a mythical northern land in classical and medieval European literature described as beyond the borders of the known world.
However, the name Ultima Thule sparked an angry reaction as it was co-opted by far-right German occultists in the early 20th century as the fabled ancestral home of ‘Aryan’ people – the term they used to describe proto-Indo-Europeans. Now the NASA team has officially named it as Arrokoth .
