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This even includes some missing moons for Jupiter. The king of our planets started in a gas envelope, like the other planets. His system had a bit of weight, but the slow trail of this cloud may have resulted in moons as big as Mercury in the hell inside the planet below.
"Some people say that if a huge gas disk was to Jupiter for too long, the moons would begin to fall," says Matija Ćuk, researcher at the SETI Institute
The idea that Jupiter lost some of its early satellites was highlighted in a 2009 article published in the book .] Europa .In this scenario, there were not four Galilean mbad satellites like Io, Europa , Ganymede and Callisto, but many, some were too close to Jupiter, the primordial gas that surrounded them slowed their orbits until they fell on the planet and was destroyed in its depths.
In recent years, astronomers realized that the solar system was even more chaotic than originally thought.And it may have been chaotic up to the time of the dinosaurs in some cases.
And this is not not only Jupiter
In Roman mythology, Saturn was known to have eaten his youth – a job that was taken up by Jupiter in our solar system, apparently. But there is something really weird happening on the ring planet. If you follow the news of astronomy, you may have heard of Enceladus, a tiny moon or Saturn with a big ocean below. But while our solar system is 4.5 billion years old, Encelade is much younger.
"This is not yet common, but it is gaining credibility that the rings and moons (of Saturn) are the result of collisions, a hundred million years ago," says Ćuk. In 2016, he is the author of a study Astrophysical Journal suggesting that the inner moons of Saturn are quite young. Meanwhile, more distant moons like Titan, a world larger than Mercury with a gaseous atmosphere, could be as old as the solar system.
This is how the theory unfolds: at least two large moons of Saturn collided. Some of the debris fell on the gaseous planet, but much of it fell to the rings. About two planets of ice and rock ended up encircling Saturn. And a part crosses the Roche limit – the area around a planet where a body can no longer hold its shape and is crushed into billions of pieces, forming rings.
But Saturn also has five orbits in closely clustered orbits in the debris area but outside the Roche boundary – Enceladus, Mimas, Tethys, Rhea and Dione. Each is a few hundred kilometers in diameter. Some have a substantial part of the rock, others seem to be entirely ice balls. But this rock and ice can have formed worlds of similar size that were destroyed and recreated in new configurations. In other words, the satellites we see today can contain pieces of this far-off lost moons.
And current moons have strange orbital inclinations suggesting that they can still settle. The rings of Saturn are, at best, 200 million years old – if the five small moons have similar lifespans, they may be among the youngest members of our solar system family
Then there is poor Neptune. Today, Neptune serves as a shepherd of the Kuiper Belt, the frozen region of the solar system where Pluto lives. The objects in the Kuiper Belt are in orbit in what astronomers call a 2: 3 resonance with Neptune, completing three orbits each time Neptune makes two. This keeps the orbits tidy, and prevents collisions with Neptune.
But a long time ago, the belt had many more objects, and they spent a lot in the Neptune system. The Kuiper belt of today has only a small fraction of its original mbad today. While the planets were still in orbit, Neptune was firing and swaying around much of the Kuiper Belt material, including the flying worlds outside the solar system. But in the process, Neptune has won a giant moon – while losing a series of smaller ones.
Some theories suggest that two particular objects came through Neptune, probably a pair roughly equivalent in size – as if they were the moons of each other. This double dwarf planet was separated by Neptune – the object that remained behind Neptune back. We know him today as Triton.
"Meetings with Neptune are common, and Triton arrives slowly," Ćuk says. "The main theories are that Triton was a binary, and half escaped."
One of these moons made its way through an area where Neptune's original moons resided. Because he was in orbit back, those little moons may have hit their head intruders. Triton can be made from 10% of Neptune's original inner moons.
There are, of course, some other theories of the lost moon floating there – when a protoplanet called Theia broke on Earth to form the moon, it may have created several moons. And, until we can study the moons of the outer solar system in depth, we can not fully understand if any of these hypotheses hold water.
Ćuk says that planets that escape a giant planet do not last long. A few lucky ones could, in good conditions, be ejected, but most will take an orbit just outside their original planet – and eventually collide with it. Other moons may have destabilized enough to finally fall into the Sun.
But whatever the ultimate answer, our solar system may have been a lot more full of moons than we ever imagined – and their ghostly trail awaits us to discover it.
This article was published on Discovermagazine.com.
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