Arrokoth, an ancient but unassuming body orbiting in the distant, cold region of the Kuiper Belt beyond Neptune, is perfectly poised to begin giving us answers. The distant world has likely changed very little since its formation near the solar system’s birth, so it functions as a time capsule of sorts from that ancient milieu.

And the view of that ancient world, astronomers say, points clearly to a past where objects like it formed from the direct collapse of the original solar nebula — the gaseous cloud that eventually collapsed to become our solar system.

Made up of two red-hued lobes, like a slightly flattened snowman, Arrokoth has a relatively smooth surface with few signs of asteroid impacts. Most importantly, the two lobes appear to have been moving and spinning in match step even before they made contact. One can imagine two lovers on a walk, gravitating together even before they reach out and join hands.

It’s a formation story that helps answer an old cosmic riddle posed by differing interpretations of available data.

“For decades, there’s been a war of computer models,” says New Horizons’ Principal Investigator, Alan Stern, in an interview with Discover. One side backed the so-called hierarchical accretion model, where dust grains collided to form pebbles, which formed rocks, then boulders, and finally large bodies in a long and violent game of bumper cars. The other side argued for cloud collapse, meaning the original nebula of dust and gas swirled together through gravity and very gently collapsed directly into larger bodies. It may seem like a fine distinction, but it’s one that has big implications for how our solar system came to be.

Arrokoth, orbiting in the remote hinterlands of the solar system, provides a never-before-seen view of how the process of forming planets actually happened.

“We never went to an object that was as primitive and well preserved as Arrokoth,” says Stern. “It’s basically unchanged since four-plus billion years ago when it formed.” That makes it priceless for answering questions about the solar system’s deep past.