NASA's Photos of Ultima Thule Suggest Long-Ago Moons

'Scientists from NASA's New Horizons mission released the first detailed images of the most distant object ever explored,' reports the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab (which is operating the spacecraft). 'Its remarkable appearance, unlike anything we've seen before, illuminates the processes that built the planets four and a half billion years ago.'
Tablizer (Slashdot reader #95,088) shares their report:
'The new images -- taken from as close as 17,000 miles (27,000 kilometers) on approach -- revealed Ultima Thule as a 'contact binary,' consisting of two connected spheres. End to end, the world measures 19 miles (31 kilometers) in length. The team has dubbed the larger sphere 'Ultima' (12 miles/19 kilometers across) and the smaller sphere 'Thule' (9 miles/14 kilometers across). The team says that the two spheres likely joined as early as 99 percent of the way back to the formation of the solar system, colliding no faster than two cars in a fender-bender...
Data from the New Year's Day flyby will continue to arrive over the next weeks and months, with much higher resolution images yet to come.
Space.com reports that astronomers are now hunting for moons near Ultima Thule. At a Thursday news conference, a New Horizons co-investigator from the SETI Institute explained that the rotation of Ultima Thule appears to have been slowed by orbiting moons, and the discovery of 'Any moon at all, on any orbit at all, will tell us the mass and the density to pretty decent usable precision.' Although it's also possible that the moons of Ultima Thule have since drifted away.
Space.com adds that the New Horizons spacecraft 'has enough fuel and power, and is in good enough health, to potentially fly past a third object, if NASA grants another mission extension.'

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