Abha Jain is a freelance science writer. She did a masters degree in biology, specializing in neuroscience, from the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, India, and is almost through with a bachelor's degree in archaeology from the University of Leicester, UK.
A passing star may be responsible for more than three-fourths of the moons in our solar system as the stellar traveler flung massive rocky bodies into our cosmic neighborhood, a new study suggests.
But some satellites are much stranger. Take Phoebe, one of Saturn's weirder moons. It has an oval-shaped, tilted orbit on which it moves in the opposite direction as Saturn rotates — a movement described as retrograde. In fact, satellites like Phoebe, also called irregular moons, outnumber regular ones in the solar system three to one.
By submitting your information you agree to the Terms & Conditions and Privacy Policy and are aged 16 or over.However, this scenario can't explain certain aspects of the irregular moons. For instance, few have a very red color. But the new study, published Sept. 4 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, explains these oddities by providing an alternative theory: that a passing star"kicked" the moons in place.
The researchers' simulations showed that if the visiting star swooped past at a 70-degree angle to the ecliptic plane ― the plane in which Earth orbits the sun ― it catapulted roughly 7% of KBOs along stretched, oval-shaped orbits that brought them near the giant planets. Many of them — particularly those whose new paths brought them near Jupiter or Saturn — had retrograde orbits, and few were very red― both trends that irregular moons show today.
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