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Something Twice the Size of Earth Slammed into Uranus and Knocked It Over (2018)
- madesimplemedia 8y agoLove this, space is so fascinating.
- Arnt 8y agoSo Uranus is "tilted on its side relative to its fellow planets, by about 98 degrees." Why is that not an 82-degree rotation?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- tangent128 8y agoAxial tilt is sometimes defined such that 0° is when the orbital and rotational axes align, including direction of rotation; Venus has a tilt of 177° by this standard, because of its retrograde rotation compared to the majority of the planets.
- yammajr 8y agoPossibly because that would explain its rotation being the reverse of the other planets(except Venus). If it started rotating the same way as the other planets and were rotated 82 degrees, it would still be rotating in the same direction as the other planets, where as by rotating 98 degrees, the rotation is reversed.
- hn_throwaway_99 8y agoI've been alive for many, many decades. I wish I could say I've matured past Uranus double entendres, but I haven't.
- notacoward 8y agoI will freely admit that I had the same reaction to the headline. Ow! I think I'd remember something like that. #forever12
- Roboprog 8y agoTitle is a bit click-bait-y :-)
- sunnyP 8y agoYou're not the only one.
- mercer 8y agoFarnsworth: I'm sorry, Fry, but astronomers renamed Uranus in 2620 to end that stupid joke once and for all.. Fry: Oh. What's it called now? Farnsworth: Urectum.
- 8bitsrule 8y agoThe simulation suggests it could have happened that way. That doesn't translate well into that headline. (Given the domain name, a person might hope for better.) Impact hypotheses are a popular type of explanation. Some may survive actual exposure to evidence, and eventually become theories. This is quite an old idea (as is the idea that the Moon impacted the Earth); maybe one day it'll pan out. Until then, it'd be great to see fewer hypotheses in 'Science News' headlines ... and more evidence.
- becga 8y agoThe author Zecharia Sitchin wrote about this in one or more of his books. His claim is that the Sumerians wrote about this exact thing.
- 3R3130R 8y agoif something is rotating clockwise with respect to surroundings. let us say, and we were to then turn the object 180 degrees in a plane perpendicular to its rotation, the result is an object that is now rotating COUNTERCLOCKWISE with respect to its surroundings. In summary, an impact with a another rotating object and transfer of momentum is not the only way. the object could have undergone a pole flip.
- staticautomatic 8y agoIn theory, would it be possible to look for the object by looking in the direction predicted by the model?