LAUREL, Md. — A couple of days before the New Horizons spacecraft made its flyby of a small, icy world far beyond Pluto, scientists working on the mission finally got a picture of the body, nicknamed Ultima Thule, that was more than a single dot. It looked a bit elongated, but that was really all that could be detected from the image.

“I’ve never seen so many people so excited about two pixels,” said S. Alan Stern, the principal investigator of the mission, during a news conference on Monday.

Two days later, the scientists unveiled images from the flyby with some 28,000 pixels. They could finally make out some meaningful details, which could eventually advance scientific understanding of the solar system’s earliest days.

The New Horizons team will have to wait 20 months for all of the spacecraft’s data and images to return to Earth, but here is what they’ve learned so far.