Cape Canaveral, Florida: The most distant world ever explored, more than 6 billion kilometres away, finally has an official name: Arrokoth. That means "sky" in the language of the Native American Powhatan people, NASA said.

Arrokoth means 'sky' in the language of the Native American Powhatan people. Credit:NASA

Arrokoth (pronounced AR-oh-kodh) is a Kuiper Belt object, one of millions of icy bodies that exist beyond the orbit of Neptune. As a frozen fragment of the material that formed the planets, scientists say, it holds clues to the earliest days of the solar system.

NASA's New Horizons spacecraft flew past the snowman-shaped Arrokoth on New Year's Day, three years after exploring Pluto. At the time, this small icy world 1.6 billion kilometres beyond Pluto was nicknamed 'Ultima Thule' – known in classical and medieval literature to represent distant places beyond the 'known world'.

However, Ultima Thule also had an unintended white supremacist connection: Nazis used it to refer to a mythical homeland of the Aryan people and it remains in use by far-right groups.