Scienceblogtwo

Saturn is a blatant indicator that the planet is rotating tilted. The belted giant rotates with respect to the plane of its orbit around the sun at a 26.7-degree inclination. Since Saturn's tilt precesses, like a spinning top, at almost the same rate as Neptune's orbit, astronomers have long hypothesized that this tilt results from gravitational interactions with its neighbor Neptune. Saturn may have once been in sync with Neptune, but according to a recent modeling research by scientists at MIT and other institutions, Saturn has since eluded Neptune's influence. What was responsible for this planetary realignment? The one carefully examined theory the team has is a missing moon. The team claims in a paper published in Science that Saturn, which currently has 83 moons, originally had at least one additional satellite that they have named Chrysalis. The researchers hypothesize that Chrysalis, together with its siblings, orbited Saturn for several billion years while exerting...