Wouldn’t the body have slowed down while passing through is thick atmosphere before reaching the core, thereby not affecting the planet’s tilt?
In: 12
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.
Latest Answers