How far would a twenty-mile long snowman stretch from your house? That would be enormous. However, if that snowman were 4 billion miles away that would be another matter. That is the size and distance of Ultima Thule. And on New Year’s Day the folks at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab celebrated hitting it with a snowball. Well, maybe not a snowball, but a small space craft flew by within 2,200 miles, close enough. This was after skimming by poor down sized Pluto (I’m still bummed out about that) in 2015. Ultima Thule is 1 billion miles beyond Pluto. Now the spacecraft is over a million miles farther into the Kuiper Belt, and we still aren’t out of our own solar system, we still haven’t left the neighborhood.
Sunday many of us will confess in the words of Nicene Creed, “I (we) believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible.” This not only includes what we read in Genesis 1, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth,” but also John’s Christmas account, “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us” as well as Jesus’ words before Pontius Pilate, “My kingdom is not of this world.”
The discovery and fly-by of a 20-mile-long snowman 4 billion miles away is beyond amazing. Yet, it has hardly scratched the surface of what is in other neighborhoods.