Spacecraft set a record – to arrive at the solar system's edge

way to Go New Horizons! sounded in the speakers at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory in Maryland at 00.33 on new year's day local time.

New Horizons flown by Ultima Thule with their cameras and instruments targeted towards the celestial body located 160 million miles beyond Pluto. A human craft has never before visited a celestial body so far out in the universe. The previous record was struck when Pluto was visited in 2015 – also of New Horizons, writes Reuters.

Both Pluto and the Ultima Thule is located in the so-called kuiper belt, which is made up of millions of frozen objects in orbit around the sun beyond the orbit of Neptune. The trip started already in 2006, when New Horizons left earth with the aim to study Pluto and the kuiper belt. But Ultima Thule was still unknown to the scientific community then, and it was not until eight years later that it jordnötsformade the object photographed by the Hubble space telescope.

to earth the first images from the spacecraft to linger. But a milestone has been reached in the rymdvetenskapen can't miss.

Physicist and rymdforskaren Hal Weaver, who worked with New Horizons since its inception, says to AFP that the project is at the forefront of planetary research.

Now, hopes to get answers on how planets like earth formed, which is made possible precisely thanks to the fact that the Ultima Thule is so frozen.

" We have finally reached the outskirts of the solar system and these things that have been there since the beginning and barely changed – we think. We will find out, " he says.