Uranus has a massive tilt of 98 degrees off the orbital plane, which may result from a mysterious moon moving away from Uranus and pulling the planet over onto its side.
According to French experts from the National Center for Scientific Research (via Vigour Times), it wouldn't have needed to be a giant moon to have this impact.
Moon Causes Uranus To Tilt
A satellite twice as massive as Earth's moon may have caused Uranus to tilt. However, Daily Mail said a larger satellite is more likely to blame.
Another peculiarity of Uranus is its peculiar tilt. It rotates oppositely from most of the other planets in our Solar System and clockwise as well.
Previous studies have hypothesized that Uranus' peculiar behavior may be related to a big object that struck the planet billions of years ago and tilted it around twice the size of Earth.
According to 2018 research obtained by Daily Mail, the "cataclysmic" impact may have altered Uranus' development and contributed to its cold temperatures.
The issue with that hypothesis is that it fails to explain why Neptune, its neighbor, has several characteristics to Earth, including masses, rotation rates, the dynamics and make-up of their atmospheres, and peculiar magnetic fields.
This prompted researchers to look for alternative theories, such as a wobble that may have been caused by a massive ring system or a massive moon early in the formation of the Solar System.
Astronomer Melaine Saillenfest, the study's principal investigator, discovered something intriguing about Jupiter a few years ago.
In a few billion years, the gas giant's tilt might rise from its negligible 3 percent to almost 37 percent. The cause is the moon's outward movement.
Then they turned their attention to Saturn, where they discovered that Titan, its biggest moon, may have rapidly migrated outward to cause its current tilt of 26.7 degrees.
Theoretically, this might have happened while having little impact on the planet's rotation rate, according to the researchers.
Why Natural Satellite Caused Planet To Go Weird
This prompted the scientists to simulate a potential Uranian system to see if a similar mechanism might account for its peculiar behavior.
They discovered that a fictitious moon might tilt Uranus toward 90 degrees if it migrated by more than 10 times Uranus' radius at a pace of more than 6 centimeters per year and had a minimum mass of roughly half that of Earth's moon.
The tilt and spin we now observe in Uranus, however, would be more likely to result from a bigger moon that is equivalent to Jupiter's Ganymede.
The issue with the hypothesis is that the minimal mass, which is equivalent to around half an Earth moon, is almost four times greater than the total mass of all currently recognized Uranian satellites.
However, even for that, the researchers believe they have a solution.
The work has been approved for publication in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics and made available on the preprint server arXiv.
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