NASA's Pic Of Snowman-Shaped Ultima Thule Inspires Hilarious Memes, Jokes

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft, on the first day of 2019, successfully "phoned home" after a journey to the most distant world ever explored by humankind. The small, icy world, nicknamed Ultima Thule, lies at a distance of 6.5 billion km from earth. NASA's space probe managed to come within 3,540 km of Ultima Thule, a 32-km-long space rock in the Kuiper Belt - a ring of icy celestial bodies just outside Neptune's orbit.

About ten hours ago, NASA shared a picture of the snowman-shaped Ultima Thule on Twitter. The object, which looks like a snowman, has since then inspired a lot of jokes and memes on the micro blogging website.

Since being shared, the picture has collected over 5,000 'likes' and almost 2,000 'retweets', along with a ton of comments.

While some have compared Ultima Thule to a snowman, others to a peanut. Take a look at some of the best tweets it has inspired:

Among other things, Ultima Thule has been compared to a giant space turtle, a fat bowling pin and "Kenny from South Park".

It has also led to a lot of jokes

Ultima Thule's odd shape indicates that it formed as two spherical rocks slowly fused together in the early days of the solar system. Scientists call it a "contact binary", and it lends support to a theory that suggests worlds are born from slow accumulation, rather than catastrophic collisions.