A new paper suggests that Neptune's unusually large moon, likely captured from the Kuiper Belt and moving in a retrograde orbit, gradually changed the planet's rotational axis, leading to its current tilt.
Neptune-Rahab, the most distant planet in the solar system, is located more than 30 times the distance between Earth and the Sun, completes one orbit around the Sun in about 165 Earth years, and is also considered the windiest world in the solar system in terms of wind speeds. However, one of the long-standing puzzles associated with it is not its weather, but the inclination of its rotational axis: Neptune is tilted by about 28 degrees relative to its orbital plane, an angle that is not as extreme as that of Uranus, but still requires a convincing dynamic explanation.
Now astronomer Rodney Gomes of the State University of São Paulo offers a new explanation: not an ancient collision with a large planetary body, but the long-term impact of triton, Neptune's largest moon. In a preliminary paper published March 19 on arXiv, Gomes argues that the tidal evolution of Triton's orbit after its capture by Neptune could have brought the planet's rotational axis into resonance with the solar system's dynamical frequency s8, gradually increasing its tilt to the value observed today. (arXiv)
Triton itself is a very unusual body. According to NASA, it is the only large moon in the solar system that moves in an orbit Retrograde — that is, in the opposite direction to the rotation of its planet. That’s why researchers have long believed that Triton did not form around Neptune, but was originally a Kuiper Belt object that was captured by Neptune’s gravity early in the solar system’s history. The new study takes the capture idea one step further: Not only was Triton captured, but that capture may have reshaped Neptune itself.
According to Gomes' simulations, Triton began its journey around Neptune in an eccentric and highly inclined orbit, and over millions of years, it drifted under the influence of tidal forces to its current close, nearly circular orbit. In this process, the moon's orbit interacted with Neptune's rotational axis. In some of the numerical runs, the resulting tilt was more than 50 degrees, and in about a third of the cases, the resulting tilt was greater than 20 degrees—more than enough to explain Neptune's current value, if it did indeed start with a very small tilt.
The importance of the study is that it suggests a mechanism that could explain Neptune's inclination without would necessarily require a late catastrophic collision. This is a significant difference, because classical models of ice giant axial tilts often assume impacts of planetary embryos in the late stages of formation. Here, a different scenario is presented: a single trapped moon, in an unusual orbit, could be enough to change the dynamics of an entire planet.
However, it is important to emphasize that at this stageInitial article Published on arXiv, rather than in a final peer-reviewed publication. It is therefore correct to view this result as an intriguing and serious suggestion, but not yet a proven explanation. Even so, it adds a new layer to the image of Triton: not just a strange, icy moon at the edge of the solar system, but perhaps the body that tilted Neptune and left a mark on it that is still evident today.
More of the topic in Hayadan:
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This is unrelated: Kima and Kasil (the Pleiades and Orion) are star clusters, outside the solar system. Besides, we cannot see Neptune without a telescope, and neither could the authors of the Holy Zohar. (Unless they saw it in the Holy Spirit)
The distortion of chemistry and the foolishness as it appears in the Holy Zohar……..