IN BRIEF NASA releases photo of Ultima Thule

LAUREL, MD. — Ultima Thule, an icy world 4 billion miles from the sun, looks like a big snowman.

At a news conference Wednesday, scientists working with NASA’s New Horizons mission released several images that the spacecraft took as it flew by Tuesday.

The scientists now say with confidence that Ultima Thule long ago was two bodies that got stuck together, what they call a “contact binary.”

“Two completely separate objects that are now joined together,” said S. Alan Stern, principal investigator for the mission.

It also looks pristine, almost unchanged since it formed out of a disk of dust and gas that orbited the sun more than 4.5 billion years ago. Studying it could offer insights to how Earth and the other planets formed.

A day ago, scientists released a blurry picture of the small body also known by its official designation 2014 MU69 taken from a distance of half a million miles, taken before the flyby.

The object looked sort of looked like a fuzzy bowling pin.

The Brevard Zoo announced the suspension of the Rhino Encounters exhibit and similar displays in a statement Wednesday.

The 2-year-old girl was taken to a hospital for treatment Tuesday after she stumbled through steel poles separating the rhinos and spectators.

Officials at the zoo on Florida’s Space Coast say a rhino’s snout touched the girl before she was retrieved in a matter of seconds from the exhibit.