Wouldn’t the body have slowed down while passing through is thick atmosphere before reaching the core, thereby not affecting the planet’s tilt?
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New theories suggest it was less of a crash and more of a disastrous dance.
Imagine you put a heavy rock on a rope and started spinning with it around and around… but then something hit the rock. You lost your balance and fell down!
This is the current prevailing theory. Is that Uranus had a semi stable orbit with a very dense satellite. Something caused that orbit to deteriorate fairly rapidly, so the satellite while still spinning around Uranus fell towards the planet. The inertia of the spinning and the approaching satellite in a decaying orbit caused it to tilt and keep tilting until the satellite eventually landed.
The reason why we don’t think it was an initial impact that caused the tilt is because impacts were fairly common in the beginnings of the solar system. If they were that common, then we should see a heavy tilt like that in most of the planets as they were forming, but we don’t.
The new theory accounts for all that gas. By pulling something through the gas clouds, it slows down the decending object, but the momentum of an orbit would actually increase how much the planet tilts.
>**Wouldn’t the body have slowed down while passing through is thick atmosphere before reaching the core**, thereby not affecting the planet’s tilt?
The second part of that sentence in no way follows the first part! Why would anything need to “reach the core” in order to affect the planet’s motion? The [second law of motion](https://tinyurl.com/4d54h9wx) applies to everything and if a body of gas somehow influences the trajectory of an object that passes through it then the object necessarily also influences the body of gas.
> Wouldn’t the body have slowed down while passing through is thick atmosphere
That is also momentum transfer, you know. It’s just less sudden that solid hitting solid. Drop an ice cube into a large cup of water, stir it around without touching the ice in the middle. The cube will also start rotating when you get the water moving, right?
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