Thule

alternative Thulé, Thulê, Thulē, Thūlē, Tule [17ᵗʰ C.] · alternative Thyle [17ᵗʰ C.] · alternative Thylé · alternative Thoule · alternative Thoulê

1. A placename
   1. human sciencesA mythical location in Arctic The semi-legendary island of classical antiquity considered to represent the northernmost location in the inhabited world (the Ecumene).

      I have reached these lands but newly // From an ultimate dim Thule.

      1844, Edgar Allan Poe, The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe II (1859), “Dream-Land”, page 41, first stanza, lines 5–6

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      For distant India tremble may // Beneath your mighty rule, // And Thulé⁵ bow beneath your sway // Far in the Northern sea, // But if to care and want you’re prey, // No king are you, but slave.

      1969, V.E. Watts (translator), Boëthius (author), The Consolation of Philosophy, bk III, ch. v, page 89

      5. To the Romans Thulé, variously identified as Iceland or Mainland in the Shetland Isles, marked the extreme northern limit of the known world, just as India here stands for the farthest east.

      {{nibidem, footnote 5

   2. cartographyA place in Roman world The most northerly location known to have been explored in the Ancient Roman world
   3. A former settlement in Greenland, North America, of Denmark, on North Star Bay, Wolstenholme Fjord, off Bylot Sound, Baffin Bay, Arctic Ocean. A settlement in northwestern Greenland established in 1910 by the Danish explorer Knud Rasmussen.
   4. abbreviationellipsisEllipsis of Thule Base: A military base in Greenland An air base built on the site in the 1940s.

      Synonyms: Thule Air Base, Thule Space Base, Thule NORAD Base, Thule NATO Base, Thule Air Force Base, Thule Space Force Base, Pituffik, Pituffik Space Base

   5. A locality in the Murray River council area, southern New South Wales, Australia.
2. historicalA nationalist and occultist group in Germany in the early 20th century, which included some of the founding members of the Nazi Party.
3. archaeologyThe historical Eskimo culture extending from Alaska to Greenland between the 6th and 14th centuries.

alternative Thulé, Thulê, Thulē, Thūlē, Tule [17ᵗʰ C.] · alternative Thyle [17ᵗʰ C.] · alternative Thylé · alternative Thoule · alternative Thoulê

1. A region on Ultima Thule in the Kuiper Belt of the Solar System. The smaller lobe of the trans-Neptunian object Ultima Thule, a contact binary object.

   Ultima and Thule have similar colors with measured albedos ∼0.06, indicating that UT is a typical member of the Cold Classical Kuiper Belt class of objects.

   2020, Umurhan, O. M., J. T. Keane, R. A. Beyer, M. Bird, I. Linscott, S. B. Porter, J. R. Spencer et al., “Thermophysical, Gravitational, and Geomorphology Properties of 2014 MU69”, in Abstracts of the 235th AAS Meeting (Honolulu, HI), page 717

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   For the purposes of discussion, MU₆₉’s larger and smaller lobes have been informally designated “Ultima” and “Thule,” respectively, by the New Horizons team. Ultima and Thule have best-fit measured diameters of ~19.5 and ~14.2km, respectively, with errors of only a few percent at this time.

   2019 January 24, Stern, S. A., J. R. Spencer, H. A. Weaver, C. B. Olkin, J. M. Moore, W. Grundy, R. Gladstone et al., “Overview of initial results from the reconnaissance flyby of a Kuiper Belt planetesimal: 2014 MU69”, in arXiv