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It turns out that Uranus is so strange because of a mbadive collision billions of years ago.
A new study confirms that this collision with a huge object – which was about twice the size of the Earth – could have led to the extreme tilt of the planet and other weird attributes.
Uranus, the planet with an unforgettable name, is one of a kind. number of ways. "All the planets in the solar system are spinning more or less the same way … but Uranus is completely on his side," Jacob Kegerreis, lead author of the new study and researcher at the Institute of Computational Cosmology of the 39, University of Durham, United Kingdom. says Space.com. And that's not the only thing that makes the planet so strange.
Uranus also has a magnetic field "very, very strange" and it is extremely cold, even though it should "be" warmer, according to Kegerreis. In this study, Kegerreis and his team of astronomers seek to explain many strange features of the planet by attributing them to a collision with a mbadive glacial object about 4 billion years ago. [Photos of Uranus, the Tilted Giant]
To better understand how the impact affected the evolution of Uranus the team used a powerful supercomputer to simulate collisions mbadive – which has never been done before. This study confirms an older study that suggested that the significant inclination of Uranus was caused by a collision with a mbadive object.
Scientists used a high-resolution simulation to confirm that an object twice as large as the Earth collided with Uranus and altered its tilt.
Source: Jacob Kegerreis / University of Durham
Researchers suspect that this object was probably a young protoplanet, made of rock and ice. This collision is "pretty much the only way" that we can explain the inclination of Uranus, Kegerreis said.
Surprisingly, Uranus retained its atmosphere after this impact. The researchers think that's because the object has only touched the planet, hitting hard enough to change its inclination but not enough to affect its atmosphere, according to a statement from the University of Durham.
It is likely that this type of event is not uncommon in the universe: "All the evidence indicates that giant impacts are common during the formation of the planet, and with this kind research, we now get more information about their effects on "Luis Teodoro, co-author of the study and researcher at BAER / NASA Research Center Ames, said in the statement.
This composite image, created in 2004 with the Adaptive optics of the telescope of the Keck Observatory, shows the two hemispheres of Uranus. : Lawrence Sromovsky, University of Wisconsin-Madison / WW Keck Observatory
But this huge object crushing on Uranus did more than just knock it out. According to this research, when the object struck Uranus, some of the debris from the impact may have formed a thin shell that continues to trap heat from the heart of the planet. This could explain at least in part why the external atmosphere of Uranus is extremely cold.
According to Kegerreis, this collision could also explain two other quirks on the sloping planet. First, it could explain how and why some of the Uranus moons formed. The researchers believe that the impact could have brought rock and ice to the orbit of the young planet – debris that later became part of the 27-moons of Uranus. Moreover, they think that the collision could have changed the rotation of the moons that already existed at that time. Last year, a separate study also explored this aspect of the collision.
The researchers also suggest that the collision could have created melted ice and pieces of rock inside the planet, tilting its magnetic field.
Following this study, researchers hope to study this collision with even higher resolution simulations to better understand the evolution of Uranus, according to Kegerreis. He also noted that the team aims to study the chemistry of Uranus and the different ways an impact like this could have affected its atmosphere.
This work was published in The Astrophysical Journal on July 2, 2018.
Email Chelsea Gohd at [email protected] or follow @chelsea_gohd . Follow us on @Spacedotcom Facebook and Google+. Original article on Space.com.
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