Brian May is an internationally famous rock star. He was Queen's lead guitarist. But he's rocking to a different tune nowadays.
Brian May. Image source
Rocky Horizons
The Kuiper belt is a very rocky place. And pretty metallic too. It is a disc in the outer Solar System consisting of millions of asteroids—remnants from when the Solar System was formed. It is officially home to three officially recognized dwarf planets: Pluto, Haumea and Makemake.
The New Horizons interplanetary probe was launched in 2006 with the primary mission to perform a flyby study of Pluto in 2015 (we all remember the stunning pictures from that), followed by a decade studying other Kuiper belt objects (KBOs).
New Horizons has reached the most distant celestial body—the first small object in the Kuiper Belt ever visited by a spacecraft. This strange-looking rock is the 35 km long bowling pin-shaped Ultima Thule. It is located around 6.4 billion km from Earth.
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New Horizons sent some grainy, highly pixellated images of the object to earth some 3½ years ago. The processed pictures were released a week ago.
Separate colour and detail information, and a composited image of Ultima Thule. Image: NASA
Brian rocks up
So where does Brian May come into all this? Well, you see, there are two Brian Mays: one is a famous rock musician and the other is Dr Brian May, astrophysicist.
Before joining Queen, Brian May study astrophysics at Imperial College in London. Probably finding the life of a rock musician more exciting, he put his astrophysics aside for 33 years before finally returning and completing his doctoral thesis.
Dr May became part of NASA's New Horizons team, involved mainly in data analysis and stereoscopic imagery. Yes, those are the images we see above.
But it's hard to keep a good musician down. May also wrote a song titled New Horizons, to mark the flyby of Ultima Thule on New Year's Eve. The hardest part for May was that he couldn't think of anything to rhyme with Ultima Thule. Here's the video:
Rock star
Brian May has an asteroid named after him: 52665 Brianmay.
What else would you expect from the composer of We Will Rock You?
References:
Tech Times: Queen Guitarist And Scientist Brian May Releases Song About Ultima Thule Flyby
TIME: Queen Guitarist (And Astrophysicist) Brian May On His Work With NASA and His New Song About Ultima Thule
Wikipedia: New Horizons
