Astonishing. This would have been hit very hard indeed for that tipover
It's quite amazing it didn't smash into a small asteroid belt.
And a gentle nudge to policy makers on Earth.
What can happen once in the Solar system can happen again.
Enceladus, Saturn’s watery moon, may have been tipped on its axis after being battered with an asteroid, new evidence reveals. NASA’s Cassini mission may be entering its Grand Finale stage, but the data collected is still a treasure trove for discovery. Results published last month in Icarus, a planetary science journal, show …
It would have looked amazing!
These big impacts might be responsible for some of the weirdness in the planets - Uranus is practically lying on its side and the best explanation is that it was hit by something about the size of the Earth early in its life.
And *something* - probably another huge impact, robbed Venus of its rotational energy giving it a day longer than its year and sunrise in the west.
Not to mention giving us our very own humungous Moon.
From reading the article, it wasn't the impact itself that 'tipped' the moon. Instead, the impact destabilised the surface, changing its shape.
Imagine a lead ball spinning on your desk.
Now hit it with a hammer, deforming it
Try spinning it again - it's unlikely that it will spin as smoothly as it did before - it is now unstable and flops around because the mass isn't evenly distrubuted. - the centre of mass is now not at the centre of the sphere.
Over time, the moon stabilised again, now with the misshapen bit at one of the poles, where it has the least angular momentum, and the least impact on the stability.
"Is this a subliminal hint that the wonkiness is God's work?"
Maybe it was an asteroid made out of meatballs. They could still lie frozen under the icy surface, waiting to be found, to bear witness of His Noodly Goodness and put doubts to rest in the hearts of the faithless. All Hail!
Titan has Methane clouds, liquid Methane oceans and frozen Methane polar caps....
Titan never gets above -100°F....where did all of this fossil fuel come from ?
Only one answer....frozen dinosaurs, eating frozen ferns, causing frozen Methane....
(or...."Fossil Fuel is Nuclear Waste " at CanadaFreePress, Sept 2010)