It marches to the beat of its own strange drum.
Although it is similar to Neptune, it has a lot of its own quirks.
One of these is so skewed that it may as well be lying down. The plane is 98 degrees from the ground.
It's rotating in the opposite direction from most of the other planets in the solar system.
A new study shows that a moon moving away from the planet leads to Uranus being pulled over. It would not need to be a large moon. A larger moon is more likely to do it than something half the mass of our own Moon.
The National Centre for Scientific Research in France has published a paper with the reasoning. The paper has been accepted into the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics and is available for download.
The more favored explanation is a bunch of smaller objects, but scientists have come up with models to explain it.
The issues raised by this hypothesis are more difficult to explain.
The two planets have a lot of the same things. There are similarities between the two planets that suggest they could have been born together.
Scientists are looking for other explanations, such as a wobble that could have been caused by a giant ring system or a giant moon.
There was something interesting about Jupiter a few years ago. The gas giant's tilt could increase from 3 percent to 37 percent in a few billion years thanks to the outward migration of its moons.
They discovered that the rapid outward migration of its largest moon, Titan, could be the reason for the tilt of the planet. The planet's spin rate could have been affected by this.
Questions were raised about the most tilted planet in the solar system. The simulations were done to see if a similar mechanism could explain the system's quirks.
It is not uncommon for moons to move. The Moon is moving at a rate of about 4 centimeters per year. The rotation of bodies around a mutual center of gravity is affected by a tidal force on each other. This loosens gravity's grip so that the distance between the two bodies can be widened.
The team simulations included the mass of a hypothetical moon. If a moon with a minimum mass of half that of Earth's Moon moved by more than 10 times the distance of Uranus at a rate of 6 centimeters per year, it could tilt the planet towards 90 degrees.
In the simulations, it was more likely that a bigger moon would produce the tilt and spin. The combined mass of the current knownUranian moons is about four times the minimum mass.
This is also accounted for by the work. At a tilt of about 80 degrees, the moon became destabilizing, causing a chaotic phase for the spin axis that ended when the moon collided with the planet.
The researchers wrote that the new picture for the tilt of Uranus appeared promising.
This is the first time that a single mechanism is able to tilt Uranus and fossilize its spin axis in the same way. The majority of our successful runs occur at the location of Uranus.
"This picture also seems appealing as a generic phenomenon, as Jupiter is about to begin the tilt phase, Saturn may be halfway in, and Uranus would have completed the final stage, with the destruction of its satellite."
The researchers say it will be difficult to show the scenario with observations because it's not clear whether a moon large enough and at a high enough migration rate could have existed.
A better understanding of the current rate of migration would go a long way in resolving these questions. It's possible that they formed from the debris of the ancient moon after it was destroyed.
It's time to bring on that Uranus probe.
There is research available on arXiv that has been accepted into astronomy and astrophysics.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
