Arrokoth, the farthest object ever visited by a spacecraft, is helping astronomers better understand how planets are formed.

New Horizons space probe visited Arrokoth which is 4.1 billion miles from the sun after its flyby of Pluto in 2015.  Arrokoth is pretty much a time capsule from the time when the Solar System formed, 4.6 billion years ago. The data suggests that the two lobes formed in the same part of the solar nebula – the cloud of gas and dust that formed the Sun and planets. “Arrokoth looks the way it does not because it formed through violent collisions, but in more of an intricate dance, in which its component objects slowly orbited each other before coming together,” said McKinnon. The team found that the object is uniformly cold and red, coated in methanol ice and complex organic molecules.  click on title above for the latest scientific  information on how planets – including our Earth – formed.  A great easy to understand read (after clicking on “not right now box)